How fear and feeling took over modern politics
Exploring the role played by negative emotions in recent history.
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How austerity broke Britain
Why the invention of the fridge could be responsible for our love of fake news
The technology benefits everyone, which then erodes the advantage of controlled thinking – for instance, by the over-consumption of food.
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Making China great again: Xi Jinping’s troubled nationalist revival
China’s leader points to external enemies but his biggest problems are at home.
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How the Brexit battle over the Irish border throws the peace process into jeopardy
It is corroding the consensual power-sharing paradigm engendered in Northern Ireland by the Good Friday Agreement.
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How five humble fish transformed the British Isles
Cod, carp, eel, herring and salmon might seem an odd quintet, but these charismatic, story-rich species changed our nation.
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The year women said: Me Too
Helen Lewis, Linda Grant, Kate Maltby, Sarah Ditum, Janice Turner & Caroline Criado Perez on the strengths and weaknesses of…
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William Boyd’s Love is Blind: the story of a sweet-natured outsider told at a cracking pace
Boyd’s career consists of an endless flow of stories in the great realist tradition, with strong plots, well-rounded characters,…
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In Nell Dunn’s 1964 classic Talking to Women, the conversations feel more alive than ever
Dunn talks to women about, well, everything: sex, love, bodies, identity, marriage, motherhood, politics, ageing, work, freedom and money.
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The Pinter at the Pinter season already confirms the writer’s remarkable theatrical afterlife
Provocative tone and complex form triumph in new stagings of Harold Pinter’s 20 short plays.
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How austerity broke Britain – and how we can recover
After ten years of wrongheaded and brutal spending cuts, Keynes’s warning that bad economics produces political extremism is more…
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John Grant’s fourth album, Love is Magic, is a work of musical mood swings
Grant represents a very human set of contradictions. In his songs, horrific experiences are set alongside transcendent ones; cynicism…
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The deepest cuts: austerity measured
How public services from libraries and youth clubs to benefits and social care have been affected.
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I couldn’t be more glad that the Doctor is at last a woman
Rachel Cooke reviews Doctor Who and A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad.
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Mike Brearley’s Diary: Gandhi posters, table tennis – and the link between your backhand and your shrink
How amazing it was that 40 years after the death of this man, people were using him for advertisements.
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First Man has vivid, luminous cinematography, but it’s hard to say what it’s really about
It’s hard to discern Damien Chazelle’s motive for making this Neil Armstrong biopic, his first film since La La…
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Talking about my regeneration: why it’s OK not to like the new Doctor Who
After more than a decade in which I counted down the minutes to a new episode, I encountered the…
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Austerity: how an ideological project failed on its own terms
Faced with the political and economic cost of spending cuts, even the Conservatives are being forced to retreat.
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BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week, Churchill’s Passions, is full of powerful images, and sounds fantastic
Over five days, the historian Andrew Roberts condenses some of his new book’s 1,152 pages into five essays that…
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Commons Confidential: Philip Hammond’s pH imbalance
Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.
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The cry of a mysterious crepuscular bird by a Singapore rain tree reminds me of the joy of staying put
The call is plaintive, at times, sometimes rising in excitement, persistent enough to be an integral part of the twilight…
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Growing a beard is like that time I tried to write a novel. The first 3,000 words are a breeze
I was opposed to beards, until a most excellent woman asked if I’d grow a goatee. For her.
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Letter of the Week: Who’s afraid of Mr Corbyn?
A selection of the best letters received from our readers this week. Email [email protected] to have your thoughts voiced…
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This autumn, I want to look my age. I’ve decided finally to embrace grey
No one wants to become a slave to a past self. And there comes a point when glossy black hair is at…
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The growing epidemic of image and performance enhancing drug use in the Welsh valleys
Known locally as the “Valley Soldiers”, the users are buff men with an image-conscious lifestyle centred around the gym,…
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Theresa May has declared the end of austerity but that’s no guarantee it will happen
Gloomy MPs fear the PM will promise an end to cuts as Philip Hammond delivers yet more of them.
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Jacqueline Wilson Q&A: “My cat is a sensitive soul – I worry about him terribly“
The children’s author talks Victorian fairy hoaxes, a world without emails, and books about the NHS.
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What the gut knows
Horrifying, mysterious and sentient, our guts are the link between life and death – and if we understood their power…
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Trump’s climate silence, why Labour shouldn’t urge an election, and replacing Dimbleby
No politician dares advocate higher fuel taxes, restrictions on airline travel or meat rationing.
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Leader: All over the world, the free press is under attack
In Britain, both left and right are culpable. Jeremy Corbyn denounces the “mainstream media” in speeches, just as Donald Trump does.
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The long, political career of Taylor Swift
Over the past decade, Swift has navigated a changing political climate with considerable, if decreasing, deftness.
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