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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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?
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.
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?”
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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