Notebook

Letter from Donetsk: peace, with missile attacks

11 October 2014 9:00 am

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

4 October 2014 9:00 am

 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

30 August 2014 9:00 am

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

16 August 2014 9:00 am

This summer, I returned to Haiti for the first time in ten years. I was itching to see how the…

Farewell, Speccie

19 July 2014 9:00 am

So we are all going to have to pay for fatties to have stomach bands and bypasses, are we? It…

Saddam on money

Baghdad notebook: "Things were better in Saddam's time"

5 July 2014 9:00 am

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

7 June 2014 9:00 am

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

31 May 2014 9:00 am

I usually spend most of the week at home in South Devon in front of my computer. But for the…

Notes from Damascus

26 April 2014 9:00 am

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’

15 March 2014 9:00 am

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

8 March 2014 9:00 am

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

22 February 2014 9:00 am

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

25 January 2014 9:00 am

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

14 December 2013 9:00 am

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

14 December 2013 9:00 am

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

14 December 2013 9:00 am

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?

14 December 2013 9:00 am

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

16 November 2013 9:00 am

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

26 October 2013 9:00 am

 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

12 October 2013 9:00 am

Until I plotted a book on England’s best views I had not realised how much people cared. Ask them to…

Bran Castle — but don’t mention Dracula

Transylvania Diary by Thomas W. Hodgkinson - diary

21 September 2013 9:00 am

Ehe-Gefängnis. The word, strictly speaking (which is how one should always speak), means ‘marriage prison’, and refers to an austere…

Letter from Somaliland

31 August 2013 9:00 am

Ayan Mahamoud, one of the organisers of Hargeysa’s International Book Fair, has all the girly vulnerability of a factory-tested steel…

Joan Collins

Joan Collins’s notebook: Fighting libel and rude houseguests

17 August 2013 9:00 am

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

6 July 2013 9:00 am

You remember the climax of Jaws — the primeval moment when Quint the crazed Ahab-like fisherman goes mano a mano…