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?”
Millions of teenagers in Australia woke up on Wednesday to find themselves locked out of social media accounts after the government introduced a ban for under-16s – the first of its kind – on the platforms.
Far from being a kneejerk response to a moral panic, it’s a move backed up by detailed investigation into the effects of unfettered online access on children – and one that several other countries are poised to follow. Australian eSafety research found seven in 10 children aged 10 to 15 had encountered content associated with harm online. Three-quarters of those had most recently encountered that – including misogyny, violence, disordered eating and suicide – on a social media platform.
“We are seeking to create some friction [in the] system to protect children where previously there has been close to none … We are treating big tech like the extractive industry it has become,” Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, told an audience earlier this year.
Spotlight | Syria, one year after Assad While country’s return to global stage has filled many Syrians with pride, domestically old grievances threaten efforts to rebuild the state. William Christou reports from Damascus
Feature | The inside story of the race to create the ultimate AI In Silicon Valley, rival companies are spending trillions of dollars to reach a goal that could change humanity – or potentially destroy it. Robert Booth reports
Feature | On the trail of London’s snail farming don Terry Ball – renowned shoe salesman, friend to former mafiosi – has vowed to spend his remaining years finding ways to cheat authorities he feels have cheated him. His greatest ruse? A tax-dodging snail empire. Jim Waterson caught up with him
Opinion | What words are left to describe Trump’s global rampage? Deadly US boat strikes in the Caribbean are the latest example of a president corrupting both the law and morality, argues Jonathan Freedland
Culture | The best books of 2025 From fiction to food, people to poetry, science to sport: Guardian critics round up the year’s essential reads
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.
Watching with horror from London last week as flames ripped through seven adjacent apartment blocks in Hong Kong, it was impossible not to think back to the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017, which exposed major systemic failures around UK social housing and eventually led to law changes around safety and accountability for high-rise buildings.
The comparisons with Hong Kong were not just visually obvious but also because the semi-autonomous city’s worst fire in decades appears to have followed months of complaints from residents about shoddy materials used in building works.
Hong Kong is of course a very different place to London, with politicians facing less public accountability in a political climate that makes it much harder for citizens to express dissent. But, as anger rises, hard questions are nevertheless being asked of authorities amid accusations of negligence and corruption.
Five essential reads in this week’s edition
The big story | Can Europe unite to tame Russia – without the US? Washington’s Putin-appeasing plan for peace in Ukraine has failed, but many heard the death knell sound for European reliance on US protection, writes Patrick Wintour
Spotlight | If Rachel Reeves goes, will Keir Starmer fall with her? British prime ministers rarely sack their chancellors – and when they do it almost inevitably leads to their own downfall. After last week’s budget, Starmer knows the same is true of him and Reeves, says Jessica Elgot
Feature | The dangerous rise of extremist Buddhism Buddhism is still largely viewed as a peaceful philosophy – but across much of south-east Asia, the religion has been weaponised to serve nationalist goals. Sonia Faleiroinvestigates
Opinion | From the West Bank to Syria and Lebanon, Israel’s onslaught continues Broken ceasefires, bombing, ground incursions and mounting deaths: Israeli imperialism is now expanding across the region, says Nesrine Malik
Culture | Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater: two men on the moon As their 11th movie together, Blue Moon, is released, the actor and director tell Xan Brooks about musicals, the legacy of Philip Seymour Hoffman and what being bald and short does to your flirting skills
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’.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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