Category Archives: History

COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 31, 2025

Country Life December 31, 2025 | Country Life

COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Britain in 50 Treasures’ – The monuments that make the nation.

Dangerous libations

How do you cope with a Kung-Fu Panda? What do you do when the Temple of Doom strikes? Olly Smith reveals how to deal with hurricane-force hangovers

Magazine spread from Country Life 31 December 2025

Interiors

Is design destined to be more Moorish or will Egyptomania rule? Country Life predicts the shape of things to come in 2026 and Giles Kime says painted furniture is key to a laidback look

Jacu Strauss’s favourite painting

The creative director of the Lore Group chooses an intriguing unfinished 1830s painting that is still confounding art experts almost 200 years on

Learn it by art

The story of the British Isles is peppered with ancient artefacts and much-loved monuments. Charlotte Mullins surveys the centuries through 50 treasures, from the Ice Age caves of Derbyshire’s Creswell Crags to Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle at Greenwich in London

Magazine spread from Country Life 31 December 2025

Are you ready to order?

Artfully designed menus have long been a tasty proposition for collectors, aided by designs from leading artistic lights such as Ravilious, Bawden and David Hockney, finds John F. Müller

Country-house treasures

John Goodall treads the silver-grey elm floorboards of the remarkably well-preserved 1630s hall dais at Restoration House in Rochester, Kent

Culture and commerce

John Martin Robinson marvels at the rejuvenation of Salts Mill, a vast Victorian factory building at Saltaire in West Yorkshire, founded on the prosperity of the British wool trade

Magazine spread from Country Life 31 December 2025

The good stuff

Enter the new year fresh-faced and on tip-top form with the help of Amie Elizabeth White’s selection of skincare stars

Glistens like coral

The proliferation of new types of Japanese flowering quince prompted a four-year RHS trial. Charles Quest-Ritson cheers the rise of Chaenomeles and reveals his favourite varieties

Magazine spread from Country Life 31 December 2025

Arts & Antiques

The exquisitely rendered Cornish luggers sailing serenely across Henry Scott Tuke’s 1908 new year card to a friend make it a prized possession for Michael Grist, as he tells Carla Passino

APOLLO MAGAZINE – JANUARY 2026 PREVIEW

January 2026

APOLLO MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘In search of Gerhard Richter’; the man who reinvented Notre-Dame; why won’t Labour help the arts? and announcing the Apollo 40

Gerhard Richter at full scale

A mammoth retrospective in Paris confirms the German artist as one of the world’s greatest living painters – and one of the most elusive

On Viollet-le-Duc, the punchbag of Notre-Dame

While the architect’s approach to restoring France’s medieval buildings remains controversial, his many and varied talents are still utterly awe-inspiring

Finishing the Sagrada Família

Antonio Gaudi’s masterpiece is nearing completion a century after the architect’s death

When it comes to views of Venice, Canaletto is still master of all he surveys

Demand for the best paintings of the city shows no sign of sinking, but some artists have a more buoyant market than others

Should museums be making spectacles of themselves?

If galleries and institutions want to grow their visitor numbers, they need to add style to their substance

COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 24, 2025

An image of a young boy and girl waving at the flying scotsman as it steams past

COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Just The Ticket’ – The Golden Age of the Railway

Full steam ahead

Jonathan Self recalls the ‘railway mania’ that gripped the nation after the inaugural 26-mile run of Stephenson’s Locomotion No.1 from Shildon to Stockton

Mind the (hungry) gap!

Starched tablecloths and wood panelling have Emma Hughes dreaming of a return to the golden age of railway dining

Spread from Country Life 24 December 2025

Nature on track

The 20,000 miles of railway lines criss-crossing the country are welcome ‘green corridors’ for wildlife, finds Vicky Liddell

Small, but mighty

Octavia Pollock marvels at the magic of miniature railways tracing small-gauge tracks across the British countryside

Rhythm of the night

There is a wonderful sense of romance and adventure in over-night rail travel. Mary Miers revels in the sleeper-train experience

All signals green

From Suffolk to Scotland, via the Settle-Carlisle line, blooming station gardens are a sight to behold for Andrew Martin

Spread from Country Life 24 December 2025

Picking up steam

All aboard! Octavia Pollock hails the heroes of heritage railways who ensure our fascination with the age of steam rolls on and on

Drawing tracks

Carla Passino explores art’s love affair with the railway, seen in the bustle of Earl’s platforms and the serenity of a Ravilious carriage

Why don’t we ask the next train to take our love to Daddy?

The much-loved locomotives of literature reveal the softening of our attitudes to steam travel, suggests Deborah Nicholls-Lee

Spread from Country Life 24 December 2025

Rail travel

Emma Love lets the train take the strain as she rounds up the latest in luxury journeys, calling at stations from Rome to Rajasthan

The missing lynx in the food chain?

Roger Morgan-Grenville weighs up the pros and cons of calls to reintroduce an apex predator — the lynx — to the British Isles

Spread from Country Life 24 December 2025

Properties of the week

Julie Harding gets the party started with a quintet of homes boasting entertaining spaces

Sacred grounds

Tim Richardson applauds Paulo Pejrone’s revival of the 16th-century monastic gardens of Il Redentore in Venice, Italy

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – JANUARY 15, 2026

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Susan Tallman – Fairness for the Dispossessed; Kevin Power – David Szalay’s Wretched Men; Jeremy Donk – How Erik Satie Freed the Notes…

‘Minimum Victory’

Weary of war and staring down the likelihood of an unjust peace, Ukrainian intellectuals are plotting out a road map for the future. 

East Side Story

Josh Safdie’s new film, starring Timothée Chalamet, is both a character study of monomania and a moving fable of how the American century of table tennis was lost.

L’Affaire Carlson

Concern over antisemitism on the right has split the conservative world in two—and GOP gatekeepers have lost the ability to contain it.

‘They Killed Our People’

More than a century after white mobs in Elaine, Arkansas, murdered hundreds of black sharecroppers in 1919, the massacre’s memory remains contested. 

‘The Ancient and Long-Forgotten Language of Cinematography’

If the movies are dead, why does Bi Gan’s Resurrection feel so alive?

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – DECEMBER 21, 2025

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW: The latest issue features ‘Fight The Power’

John Darnielle: ‘Polish Literature Is a Whole Wondrous World!’

The novelist and musician is a voracious reader of books in translation. In “This Year,” he annotates the literary lyrics to 365 of his own songs.

Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut Had Something to Say. We Have It on Tape.

Rare recordings of E.E. Cummings, Mary Oliver and more offer a tour through literary history led by authors in their own words — and voices. Take a listen.

Once a Year the French Literary Scene Goes to the Dogs (Cats, Too)

It’s the day the “Animal Goncourt” is awarded. “Who better,” a judge says, “to talk about the fabulous relationship between animals and men than writers and philosophers?”

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – DECEMBER 12, 2025

The TLS front page from the issue dated . Issue number

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘A Snail’s Tale – An unpublished story by Sylvia Townsend Warner…

Prince of the printed word

Tactful notes from a literary self-promoter By Nicola Shulman

Object of attention

Marking the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth By Devoney Looser

Wise fools

Irritating professors for the ages By Peter Thonemann

The Pursuit and the End

An unpublished story by Sylvia Townsend Warner, with a commentary by Peter Swaab By Sylvia Townsend Warner

PHILOSOPHY NOW MAGAZINE DECEMBER ’25/JANUARY 2026

PHILOSOPHY NOW MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘The Happiness Issue’

Hedonic Treadmills in the Vale of Tears

Michael Gracey looks at how philosophers have pursued happiness.

Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosophy’s Dr Feelgood

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), the author of The World as Will and Representation, was a profound metaphysician who also advocated basing ethics upon compassion. He was a great philosopher, but notoriously pessimistic, as the following quotations might suggest.

The Good Life Paradox

Matthew Hammerton points out that a meaningful life and a life that goes well for you might not be the same thing.

Deconstructing Happiness

Abdullah Rayhan breaks down ‘happiness’ with Boethius, Kierkegaard & Montaigne.

Ancient Indian Wisdom for a Restless Age

Jahnvi Borgohain looks at a variety of approaches to happiness.

The Necessary Ache

Tara Daneshmand on regret and the courage to choose.

LITERARY REVIEW – DECEMBER 2025

LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features  Peter Marshall on Holbein * Joanna Kavenna on Camus * Sophie Oliver on Margaret Atwood * Dorian Lynskey on George Orwell * Daisy Dunn on Clodia of Rome * David Andress on Jean-Paul Marat * John Foot on the Spanish Civil War * Jerry White on high-rise buildings * Edward Shawcross on Mexico * Daniel A Bell on the Chinese examination system * Anna Reid on Russian women * Charles Darwent on Barnett Newman * Robert Crawford on T S Eliot * Ian Sansom on William Golding * Mark Lawson on John Updike * Charles Shaar Murray on musicians * Patrick Porter on NATO * Thomas Morris on Renaissance diagrams * Diane Purkiss on palmistry *  Nigel Andrew on penguins * John Mullan on pedants * Molly Pepper Steemson on Anthony Bourdain * Mark Ford on Helen Vendler * Emma Smith on book

Holbein: Renaissance Master By Elizabeth Goldring

It’s an irony to savour: the man who invented the Tudors was a German. If Henry VIII, his wives and courtiers exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than their Plantagenet precursors or Stuart successors, it is because we can all picture them so clearly. That, in turn, is due to an extraordinary sequence of portraits and drawings produced between the late 1520s and early 1540s by Hans Holbein of Augsburg (c 1497–1543), many of which have become instantly recognisable. 

Doublethink & Doubt

Orwell: 2+2=5 By Raoul Peck (dir)

George Orwell: Life and Legacy By Robert Colls

Nobody under the age of seventy-five has heard George Orwell’s voice. The only extant video footage is in a silent movie of the Eton Wall Game. None of his many wartime recordings for the BBC Eastern Service has survived. By all accounts his voice, damaged by a bullet to the throat during the Spanish Civil War, was thin, flat and weak. In fact, the controller of the BBC Overseas Service complained that putting on ‘so wholly unsuitable a voice’ made the BBC appear ‘ignorant of the essential needs of the microphone and of the audience’. 

Reviews: Best Books On Foreign Affairs Of 2025

Foreign Affairs Magazine: The very best of the hundreds of books on international politics, economics, and history that were featured in the magazine this year, selected by Foreign Affairs’ editors and book reviewers.

The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping

by Joseph Torigian

In this prodigiously researched epic, Torigian details the life of Xi Zhongxun—the father of China’s current leader, Xi Jinping—to explain the history of the Chinese Communist Party. Along the way, readers gain a sense of how the younger Xi became the man he is today.

Read the review 

Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet

by Edward Luce

Luce, a gifted storyteller, chronicles the personal life and intellectual journey of former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who played a significant but underappreciated role in opening the ​United States to China, bringing the Cold War to an end, and shaping the world that came after. In writing this gem of a book, Luce has rendered a genuine service to history.

Read the review 

Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation

by Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov

Soldatov and Borogon, two Russian journalists, tell the story of their one-time group of friends and colleagues—young Russians who, over the course of the Putin years, steadily drift toward nationalist and illiberal ideas and end up as supporters of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Read the review 

The West: The History of an Idea

by George Varouxakis

In this masterful study, Varouxakis tracks the meanings of “the West” from the late eighteenth century to the present—and argues that the modern notion of the term emerged in the 1830s as a way to distinguish western Europe from Russia. Today, for beleaguered countries such as Ukraine, “the West” is still a powerful idea.

Read the review 

SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 2025 PREVIEW

SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE: The latest issue features….

Gimme Shelter

Inside America’s largest sanctuary for rescued pets—and its controversial quest to “Save Them All” By Douglas Starr | Photographs by Shayan Asgharnia

The Lost City of the Silk Road

In the remote highlands of Uzbekistan, archaeologists are uncovering the remains of a vast metropolis that may rewrite the history of the fabled trading route’s origins By Andrew Lawler | Photographs by Simon Norfolk

A Grand New Design

After a 1902 train wreck in the heart of Manhattan, one self-taught engineer proposed an improbable urban transformation. His vision reshaped the face of American cities