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A few thousand years ago, sugar was unknown in the western world. Sugarcane, a tall grass first domesticated in New Guinea around 6000BC, was initially chewed for its sweet juice rather than crystallised. By around 500BC, methods to boil sugarcane juice into crystals was first developed in India.

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Robert Burns and Mary, Queen of Scots: how the poet shaped the enduring cultural legacy of the executed monarch

Internationally synonymous with Scottish identity, Robert Burns is Scotland’s national bard, a status he has achieved through his popularity since his death in 1796. He wrote some of the country’s most famous poems, including the satirical ode, Address to a Haggis and the rousing Scots Wha Hae. His most well-known…

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Come Down to a Lower Place – a Lovecraftian Korean tale about the oppression of female workers and their bodies

The writings of H.P. Lovecraft have seen a renewal of interest in recent years, despite the fact that he was a well-known racist and xenophobe. Writing in the early 20th century, he imagined monsters that gave form to fear of difference.

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China is becoming more sexually liberal – if you are a man

Sexual attitudes have relaxed significantly in China since the Mao era. Approaching the 50th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s death and the subsequent end of the cultural revolution, there has been a significant de-politicisation of everyday life that some are calling a sexual revolution.

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Seven Dials: Netflix series turns Agatha Christie’s country-house mystery into a study of empire and war

It is 1925 and the scene is Chimneys. It’s the English stately pile of the Caterham family, but the penurious Lady Caterham (Helena Bonham Carter), has been forced to rent it to the industrial magnate Sir Oswald Coote (Mark Lewis Jones).

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Heated Rivalry matters in a sporting culture that still sidelines queer men

Heated Rivalry, the HBO TV adaptation of the second book in Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series, rounded out 2025 as a surprise, word-of-mouth success. It captures the relationship between Shane (Hudson Williams) and Ilya (Connor Storrie), two professional male hockey players, over the course of almost a decade. Along the…

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Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure criticised university elitism – it still rings true today

Thomas Hardy’s final novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), was ahead of its time in more ways that one. Upon its publication, it provoked controversy with its explicit criticism of organised religion and traditional marriage, leading to book burnings and public criticism.

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Why the mad artistic genius trope doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny

Vincent van Gogh sliced off his ear with a knife during a psychotic episode. Ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky developed schizophrenia and spent the last 30 years of his life in hospital. Virginia Woolf lived with bipolar disorder, eventually taking her own life as she felt another deep depression beginning.

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What January taught George Orwell about control and resistance

Like many of us, George Orwell saw January as a month to be endured rather than enjoyed. You can picture him steeling himself against its cold, gloom, rain, frost and wind.

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I taught art in a high-security prison – Waiting for the Out took me straight back to my classroom

Watching Waiting for the Out, the BBC’s flagship new drama series, transported me straight back to my classroom in HMP Wakefield in the mid-1990s. This decaying Victorian building at the heart of a challenged city in the north of England is one of the UK’s ten category-A, high-security prisons for…

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Should AI be allowed to resurrect the dead?

When Roro (not her real name) lost her mother to cancer, the grief felt bottomless. In her mid-20s and working as a content creator in China, she was haunted by the unfinished nature of their relationship. Their bond had always been complicated – shaped by unspoken resentments and a childhood…

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A speeding clock could solve Darwin’s mystery of gaps in animal fossil records

The oldest fossilised remains of complex animals appear suddenly in the fossil record, and as if from nowhere, in rocks that are 538 million years old.

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Odysseus the destroyer? Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey adaptation revives an ancient moral question

Imagine waking up to find strangers in your home – eating your food, killing your animals, then laughing as they blind you. Later, they tell the world you were the monster.

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Forget Audible and Amazon – I'm switching to these 5 alternatives for audiobooks and e-books in 2026

Amazon and Audible aren't the only places to get the best e-books and audiobooks –in fact, these 5 alternatives will make you feel much warmer inside.

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How poetry can sustain us through illness, bereavement and change

When COVID lockdown loomed back in 2020, many people panic-bought toilet rolls – but I stocked up on notebooks and my favourite pencils.

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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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