Great fun thank you Ryan, a pleasure to join you 🙏

“War is not over”

The Ukrainian military, 15 km from the front line, Bahmut direction

Merry Christmas to the world 🎄✨

These videos of Israeli soldiers gleefully mocking the lives of the Palestinians they’ve destroyed might be all the rage in Israel, but they convey something else entirely to the rest of us.

Nearly two years after the start of Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukrainians are beginning to ask themselves: 'How long will this war last?'. The uncertainty and the chance that the fighting will continue for years are weighing on civilians and sometimes even on the military.

Lully, Lulla, LullARGH!!!

In this excerpt, Justin Marozzi introduces us to Bābur, the 'pioneering, genre-bending warrior-poet-king, an opium-eating, hashish-smoking, wine-drinking, chess-playing diarist, gardener and calligrapher' who founded the Mughal Empire.

Read it below👇

unseenhistories.com/a-thousand-gol…

Israel has claimed it has created shelters with aid organisations in al Mawasi, a 'safe zone' in the south of Gaza.

A Sky News team visited and found no aid, no food kitchens and no help.

trib.al/POsEkcz

Another Maalouf classic 🙌

AFU: Armed Fluffs of Ukraine 🐶🇺🇦

Such a brilliant read. And great fun to contribute to The Emigre 🙏

Could whoever put £10 on a Corbyn/IRA/Palestine/legalise cannabis accumulator please get in touch to collect your winnings.

Wild story: someone took out an enormous short position against Israeli stocks five days before the October 7th attack, orders of magnitude bigger than normal trading activity and big enough to have made billions of shekels when the market crashed. haaretz.com/israel-news/20…

‘With whom do you hold parties? With whom do you drink wine?’ Bad case of FOMO from Babur writing to his BFF Khwaja Kalan, who had left Hindustan for the sweet melons of Kabul

The ever-present danger of relying on the US (not to mention Britain, Europe, the West...)

I've seen some challenges to one or two assertions in this article, but not enough to disprove the central thesis of what Israel is doing in Gaza and how it is doing it.

Devastating reporting, extraordinary investigation and a must-read

972mag.com/mass-assassina…

Very detailed +972 Magazine investigation of Israel's targeting practices in Gaza: a far more permissive attitude toward both civilian casualties and strikes on non-military targets. The whole thing is worth a read but I'll highlight a couple of key points. 972mag.com/mass-assassina…

The Christmas book tree at St. Pancras Station, London.

It features a staircase which winds up 270 shelves, stocked with over 3,800 hand-painted books.

The little booths at the bottom have speakers that read you a story while you wait for your train.

When we told the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change we didn't want to work with them they were like 'why, tho?', and this is the sort of thing that explains that: