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The Room in the Tower: the ‘real’ hauntings that inspired this year’s BBC Ghost Story for Christmas adaptation

This year’s BBC Ghost Story for Christmas is an adaptation of E. F. Benson’s 1912 tale of vampiric horror and haunted sleep, The Room in the Tower.

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A story about North Korea and Japan, an exhilarating political film and a funny spy thriller – the three best releases of 2025

In 2025, there was a lot of excellent art and culture to rave about.

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Did Charles Dickens see A Christmas Carol as an anti-slavery story?

A Christmas Carol is usually read as a Victorian morality tale about capitalism and compassion. Yet an autographed script written by Charles Dickens during the American Civil War raises the possibility he may also have understood the story as speaking to the cause of ending slavery in the US.

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To feel lonely is to be human: here’s how to handle it at Christmas

Christmas is often considered a time of connection, warmth and belonging. That’s the script, anyway. But for many people, the reality feels different; isolating, emotionally weighted and filled with comparisons that sting.

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Jane Austen celebrated Christmas with dancing, dinner parties and dangerous games

Would you dare to play Snapdragon and pluck a flaming raisin from a fiery bowl of brandy? Or don the costume of a comedic character on Twelfth Night? Jane Austen certainly would have – and did.

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Nnena Kalu has won the 2025 Turner prize – working with her has inspired my work and academic research

The 2025 Turner prize has been won by Nnena Kalu. It’s a historic win and a groundbreaking moment in the prestigious prize’s history.

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Why we need weird stories for a warming world

For centuries, nature has been the backdrop to human drama: a stage humanity dominates, exploits, or saves. But what if the planet isn’t just a setting, but a character in its own right – sometimes collaborator, sometimes adversary, sometimes utterly indifferent?

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Train Dreams on Netflix is a beautiful film – but it misses the magic of the original novella

Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams was first published in 2002 as a short story in the Paris Review. When it was reissued as a standalone novella almost a decade later, it was shortlisted for the Pulitzer prize. While the book did not win that year, somewhat strangely neither did anything else…

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How the ‘hypnagogic state’ of drowsiness could enhance your creativity

The Beatles’ song Yesterday was written in what psychologists refer to as the “hypnagogic state”. This is the twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness, when we drowsily linger in a semi-conscious state, experiencing vivid mental images and sounds.

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Inside the Regency ballroom: what you’d experience on a night out with Jane Austen

The ballrooms of Jane Austen’s Britain have been hailed in literature and period dramas as a marriage market where young men and women could meet and mingle. The ballroom set the scene for Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy’s first encounter at Meryton’s assembly rooms in Pride and Prejudice (1813), and…

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Arthur Conan Doyle explored men’s mental health through his Sherlock Holmes stories

Arthur Conan Doyle was not just one of the world’s best crime fiction writers. He was a progressive wordsmith who brought light to controversial and taboo subjects. One of those taboo subjects was male vulnerability and mental health problems – a topic of personal significance to the author.

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The real reason states first emerged thousands of years ago – new research

Globalisation, migration, climate change and war – nation states are currently under huge pressure on many fronts. Understanding the forces that initially drove the emergence of states across the world may help explain why.

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Does BBC Civilisations get its four stories of collapse correct? Experts weigh in

In four episodes, the BBC’s Civilisations series tells the story of the fall of the Romans, Aztecs, Egypt’s Ptolemies and Japan’s Edo Samurais. The show tells these stories through a combination of recreated dramatic scenes, explanation from experts and discussions of objects from the British Museum. Here, four experts in…

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I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan: an unforgettable look at gig-economy hardship

From HBO drama Succession to Netflix reality show Selling Sunset, TV depictions of work tend to treat it as a vehicle for social betterment rather than a means to survival. The Chinese writer Hu Anyan’s arresting memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, just published in an English translation, provides an…

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Cloth nappies can inspire a feelgood factor that is the secret of long-term behaviour change

During the first COVID-19 lockdown, we were both mothers trying to stay sane. Our chats often revolved around nappies, feeding, sleep deprivation and motherhood chaos. Between laughter and exhaustion, cloth nappies kept coming up in conversation.

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The five best TV shows about the Tudors – recommended by a historian

We seem to have an endless appetite for Tudor history. Films, TV shows, documentaries, books and exhibitions about this famous dynasty are produced every year. And more recently, the touring production Six has offered a compelling reimagining of Henry VIII’s wives as a work of musical theatre.

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The truth about Vikings and mead might disappoint modern enthusiasts

A group of friends sit around a table sharing stories and sipping mead. The men sport beards and the women sip from drinking horns – but these aren’t Vikings, they’re modern-day hipsters.

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Trespassers and troubadours: what to watch and listen to this week

The winner of this year’s Booker prize, Hungarian-British writer David Szalay, has often been accused of overwriting. His earlier short story collections and novels sometimes lost readers in their ornate, over-detailed descriptions. It seems he’s taken that criticism to heart. After abandoning a novel he had been working on for…

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Trespasses: little has changed for couples dating across the religious and political divide in Northern Ireland

In her 2022 novel Trespasses, Louise Kennedy captures the emotional turmoil of an intimate relationship between Cushla, a young Catholic woman, and Michael, an older married Protestant man during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Their love is difficult, not just because Michael is married but also because it is seen…

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Down Cemetery Road: Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson delight in this light conspiracy thriller

When a house mysteriously explodes in the sleepy suburbs of south Oxford and a child goes missing in the aftermath, concerned neighbour Sarah Trafford is driven to seek the truth. As an art conservator, Trafford is way out of her depth, so she enlists the help of a private investigator,…

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David Szalay’s Flesh wins the Booker prize – a deeply affecting novel about masculinity

Canadian-born, Hungarian-British writer David Szalay has won the Booker prize for his novel, Flesh. It follows the eventful life of one Hungarian, István, from his teen years to middle age.

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How five countries are adapting to the climate crisis

Countries around the world are facing worsening heatwaves, hurricanes, droughts and floods. If current trends continue, governments need to prepare for a much hotter world with a predicted increase in global temperatures of at least 2°C, possibly up to 3°C.

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The Land Sings Back: a gorgeous exhibition of drawings inspired by ecofeminism

The Land Sings Back, a new exhibition at the Drawing Room gallery in London, is a gorgeous evocation of our rights to our lands and our symbiotic relationship with nature.

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Why Jim Henson should be recognised as one of the foremost creators of fairytales on screen

In March 1955, an 18-year-old Jim Henson built a puppet from his mother’s old coat, a pair of blue jeans and some ping pong balls. The lizard-like creation first appeared on Afternoon, a television series on Washington D.C.’s WRC-TV, but became a regular on the five-minute Sam and Friends puppet…

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Children’s books feature tidy nuclear families – but the animal kingdom tells a different story

Animals in children’s stories are often depicted as living in neat mum, dad and children family units. Examples include Fantastic Mr Fox, 101 Dalmatians and, more recently, Peppa Pig and Bluey. But, this might leave people feeling like outsiders if they don’t come from a traditional nuclear family set-up.

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