Notebook
Letter from Donetsk: peace, with missile attacks
For what is technically peacetime, there’s a lot of shelling going on round here. Donetsk airport is still held by…
Pistols, airstrikes and smuggled cows: a letter from Islamic State border country
Turkey, Syria It is the early hours of the day that Parliament votes on whether to bomb the so-called ‘Islamic…
Radek Sikorski’s notebook: Goose-steppers in Oxford, and a drone in my garden
As the BA flight from Warsaw landed at Heathrow, I felt a little tremor of anxiety, though it wasn’t anything…
Ten years and an earthquake: the changing face of Haiti
This summer, I returned to Haiti for the first time in ten years. I was itching to see how the…
Farewell, Speccie
So we are all going to have to pay for fatties to have stomach bands and bypasses, are we? It…
Baghdad notebook: "Things were better in Saddam's time"
In the passport queue at Baghdad airport, my heart sinks. This place vies with Cairo for the title of most…
A Russian occupation and a veterans' revolt – it's D-Day all over again
The phrase ‘ring of steel’ hardly begins to describe the operation here in Calvados country as we await the 70th…
Jonathan Dimbleby’s notebook: In defence of Chris Patten
I usually spend most of the week at home in South Devon in front of my computer. But for the…
Notes from Damascus
As I looked out of the window of my hotel bedroom, studying the view of central Damascus, the mobile phone…
Crimean notebook: ‘They’ll have to break all my bones to make me a Russian citizen’
Vladimir Putin still swears that there are no Russian troops in Crimea, so their mission is to say as little…
Simon Callow’s notebook: What it’s like to lose at an awards ceremony
It was one of those weeks. On Monday, I was in four countries: I woke up at crack of dawn…
Ian Buruma’s notebook: Teenagers discover Montaigne the blogger
Bard College in upstate New York, where I teach in the spring semester, is an interesting institution, once better known…
Clarissa Tan's Notebook: Why I stopped drinking petrol
Florence was in fog the day I arrived. Its buildings were bathed in white cloud, its people moved as though…
Andrew Marr's notebook: Rescued by Jonathan Ross
We live by simple stories. X has a stroke. X recovers; or doesn’t. But we live inside more complicated stories.…
Melvyn Bragg's notebook: I found hell on Regent Street
John Lloyd, producer of Blackadder, Spitting Image, QI etc, has boldly picked up where he left off at Cambridge more…
Lily Cole's notebook: My digital dream
I’m in London to work on impossible.com, the social network I have been developing for two years. Impossible is a…
Anthony Horowitz's notebook: Have our schools lost all faith in culture?
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, the Master of the Queen’s Music, recently wrote about the almost total ignorance of young people…
Joan Collins's notebook: Captain Phillips is great, but Gravity sent me to sleep
All eyes on the Philippines this week, and rightly so. Godspeed to those American and British ships making their way…
Note to the opposition: Tony Abbott is not to blame for the bushfires
Australia One of the odd things about bushfires as we know them in Australia is the unlikely truces declared between…
Simon Jenkins's notebook: Why a wind farm will never be as beautiful as a railway viaduct
Until I plotted a book on England’s best views I had not realised how much people cared. Ask them to…
Transylvania Diary by Thomas W. Hodgkinson - diary
Ehe-Gefängnis. The word, strictly speaking (which is how one should always speak), means ‘marriage prison’, and refers to an austere…
Letter from Somaliland
Ayan Mahamoud, one of the organisers of Hargeysa’s International Book Fair, has all the girly vulnerability of a factory-tested steel…
Joan Collins’s notebook: Fighting libel and rude houseguests
I recently had to spend a great deal of time attempting to clear my name from a ludicrous assertion in…
Is my rod big enough? Boris Johnson’s fishing notebook
You remember the climax of Jaws — the primeval moment when Quint the crazed Ahab-like fisherman goes mano a mano…
