Linda Grant’s Diary: The best Brexit movie, washing machine nightmares and the question they ask all novelists
The weather over the Easter weekend was very fine and warm and we had a family barbecue. The old…
ByNew Statesman Magazine
In this week’s magazine
A very British scandal
Leader: Ten years on from the MPs’ expenses scandal
In May 2009, the Daily Telegraph received a leak that would change British politics and enrage the electorate. The…
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Welcome to the age of ironic bigotry, where old hatreds are cloaked in woke new language
Do you remember GamerGate? I wish I didn’t. In 2014, an online and offline harassment campaign was waged against…
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Labour and voters have something in common: they both want Brexit to go away
How do we know that Britain hasn’t left the European Union yet? For most people, the answer is “because…
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How one remarkable game marked the end of an era and the beginning of the New Football
Just recently I was contacted by a journalist from the French sports daily newspaper L’Équipe, who was writing an…
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Letter of the week: The other side of vaccination
Four decades in general practice, reassuring parents at baby clinics that NHS advice to vaccinate their children was a…
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Here’s a question for the whole media: do we shut out or expose those with unpleasant views?
It used to be easy covering election campaigns. As soon as the battle began, the stopwatch came out and…
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Commons Confidential: Red Ed’s alternative history
Snouts are whispering crumbs from the joyless Tory-Labour Brexit talks, with Philip Hammond accused of looking down his nose…
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Meet the Instagram cleaning icon making women scrub harder
In January 2019, supermarket Morrisons announced it was rationing one of its products to two per customer. The £2.50…
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Why Britain needs its own Green New Deal
Climate change is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. Last month, as the activist movement Extinction Rebellion staged 11 days…
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Vox Lux is a wry, satisfying tale of a troubled pop star
The actor-turned-director Brady Corbet has pulled off quite the double coup for his film Vox Lux, securing not only…
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Robert Macfarlane’s Underland takes us to the catacombs and beyond
The Paris catacombs are no secret; quite the opposite, these days. The first time I headed down through the…
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Two new poems by Joe Dunthorne
I decided to stop therapy because I was perfect. And how might your perfection appear to others? Classic my…
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Dead men walking: why terrorists embraced suicide bombing
As Tsar Alexander II’s iron-clad carriage came around the corner of a snowy St Petersburg street, the first bomber hurled…
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The story of Jordan, punk’s poster girl
When I think back to my time as a punk, the seven stages of grief – shock, denial, anger, bargaining,…
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Hugo Rifkind’s Search for Power is devastatingly mild radio comedy
The Times columnist Hugo Rifkind’s new three-part satirical series, about who in modern Britain has power (3 May, 11:30am…
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Netflix’s Tuca & Bertie is a joyfully messy anthropomorphic animation
Tuca & Bertie opens with an ending. After six years, loud, sporadically employed, “short-short-wearing connoisseur of snacks” Tuca (an…
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Forensics: The Real CSI is Silent Witness without the decorum
You can see why the BBC has subtitled its much-trailed new series about forensic scientists “The Real CSI”, and…
By Vox Lux is a wry, satisfying tale of a troubled pop star
The actor-turned-director Brady Corbet has pulled off quite the double coup for his film Vox Lux, securing not only…
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Why we can no longer ignore the terrifying impact of the lucrative grouse-hunting business
Earlier this year, a long-term study of satellite-tagged hen harriers revealed that, from a sample of 58 in total,…
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Helle Thorning-Schmidt: “Game of Thrones got me through post-election blues”
Helle Thorning-Schmidt was born in Rødovre, Denmark in 1966. She served as the first female prime minister of Denmark…
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A big problem for the NHS: reconciling local independence with central control
Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) are statutory bodies established under Andrew Lansley’s 2012 Health and Social Care Act. There are…
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From vodka to accountancy and theology classes – the strange tale of Duff McKagan from Guns N’ Roses
Duff, the bass player from Guns N’ Roses, was a pastry chef once. He made blueberry muffins, then he…
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Welcome to Lezardia: our flag is a beaver rampant, and the tourists will pay me a tithe
In a week’s time I will be homeless; but let me go out with style. And so I am:…
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