If not now, when?

Gaston Fébus and the thrills of the chase

A 14th-century hunting manual offers a vision of the ideal relationship between man and nature.

Peggy Seeger: “Ageing is a process of watching yourself decompose slowly”

The 85-year-old folk legend reflects on a life in music and why she feels “invisible”.

Jane Garvey’s Life Changing and the human voice

Her guests reveal so much of themselves, as they speak with audible ambivalence, pain or shame about life-altering experiences.

Johnny Vegas: Carry on Glamping is a loopy, joyful series

I’ve always had weirdly tender feelings for Vegas. Inside the grotty T-shirt lurks a passionate aesthete.

Wild Mountain Thyme: anticlimax, slapstick and terrible accents

This Jamie Dornan-Emily Blunt romance is a film for anyone who found Ed Sheeran’s “Galway Girl” frustratingly short on…

Rachel Cusk and the art of the midlife crisis

How the 54-year-old novelist has made a career out of destruction and reinvention.

The fall of the intellectual

Where have all the great thinkers gone?  

The men who reinvented warfare

Malcolm Gladwell’s new book The Bomber Mafia and the visionaries who wanted to make conflict “clean”.

Reviewed in short: New books by Sam Lee, Edmund de Waal, Polly Barton and Matthew Brown and Rhian Jones

The Nightingale by Lee, Letters to Camondo by de Waal, Fifty Sounds by Barton and Paint Your Town Red by Brown…

The NS Poem: from uncivil

A new poem by Andrew McMillan. 

This book has been cancelled

Blake Bailey’s new book on Philip Roth has been withdrawn by its US publisher after multiple allegations of sexual…

Why the Chinese Communist Party is stronger than ever 100 years after its creation

Under Xi Jinping, the party appears unassailable and increasingly hostile to the West.

My lockdown nostalgia

How I miss the sunny lockdown mornings of late spring last year, when I frogmarched my two children to…

If not now… never? Nicola Sturgeon on the battle for a second Scottish referendum

The First Minister discusses “utilitarian” nationalism, what Catalonia got wrong and Scotland’s future. 

Rukmini Iyer Q&A: “It’s time to crack open the wine“

The author and recipe writer discusses Period Queen by Lucy Peach, Michelle Obama and life after the pandemic. 

Email [email protected] if you would like to be the New Statesman’s subscriber of the week. 

We have now nearly eradicated polio – Covid needs the same treatment

I’ve never seen a case of polio, and it’s all thanks to immunisation. 

This England: Hit the spot

This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s Richard II, refers to the whole of Britain –…

Browsing my children’s shelves, I understand how the books we read make us who we are

It’s why we keep books, isn’t it, for the little ghosts of our past selves contained within? 

I’ve never been a Dominic Cummings fan but right now he is giving the nation what it needs

It does the soul good to see front-page headlines in the Daily Mail denouncing our ridiculous, mendacious and villainous Prime Minister.

I’ve discovered the delights of Romanian cuisine, in all its garlicky glory

I’m ashamed to say I didn’t even know Transylvania was part of Romania before Irina Georgescu’s Carpathia landed on my doormat.

Letter of the week: A very British problem

A selection of the best letters received from our readers this week. Email [email protected] to have your thoughts voiced…

The sex recession: How our love lives are stunted by hyper-sexualisation

It is wrong to assume that publicly talking about sex will necessarily lead to people having better sex lives.

How would Scotland work inside the EU? Five years on from Brexit, nationalists still don’t have a clue

Even as domestic support for independence has risen, there has been little agreement within the nationalist camp about what…

Alan Duncan’s Diary: Boris Johnson’s private life, horrible road signs and why the Tories are lucky

The Conservatives were blessed in the general election by Jeremy Corbyn, and much of the PM’s good fortune stems from…

Why we need a new global concert of powers

The UN’s permanent security council and the G7 no longer represent the world, so there is a gap in…

Labour is too weak to win and too strong to die

The Hartlepool by-election shows Labour is rudderless in an era in which cultural values, not class, shape voting patterns. 

Jane Garvey’s Life Changing and the human voice

Her guests reveal so much of themselves, as they speak with audible ambivalence, pain or shame about life-altering experiences.

Johnny Vegas: Carry on Glamping is a loopy, joyful series

I’ve always had weirdly tender feelings for Vegas. Inside the grotty T-shirt lurks a passionate aesthete.

The men who reinvented warfare

Malcolm Gladwell’s new book The Bomber Mafia and the visionaries who wanted to make conflict “clean”.

Rukmini Iyer Q&A: “It’s time to crack open the wine“

The author and recipe writer discusses Period Queen by Lucy Peach, Michelle Obama and life after the pandemic. 

Reviewed in short: New books by Sam Lee, Edmund de Waal, Polly Barton and Matthew Brown and Rhian Jones

The Nightingale by Lee, Letters to Camondo by de Waal, Fifty Sounds by Barton and Paint Your Town Red by Brown…

The NS Poem: from uncivil

A new poem by Andrew McMillan. 

Email [email protected] if you would like to be the New Statesman’s subscriber of the week. 

We have now nearly eradicated polio – Covid needs the same treatment

I’ve never seen a case of polio, and it’s all thanks to immunisation. 

This England: Hit the spot

This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s Richard II, refers to the whole of Britain –…

Browsing my children’s shelves, I understand how the books we read make us who we are

It’s why we keep books, isn’t it, for the little ghosts of our past selves contained within? 

I’ve never been a Dominic Cummings fan but right now he is giving the nation what it needs

It does the soul good to see front-page headlines in the Daily Mail denouncing our ridiculous, mendacious and villainous Prime Minister.

I’ve discovered the delights of Romanian cuisine, in all its garlicky glory

I’m ashamed to say I didn’t even know Transylvania was part of Romania before Irina Georgescu’s Carpathia landed on my doormat.

The politics of Hartlepool, a candidate on Mars and the PM’s penury

Labour’s belief that all it will take to win the by-election is to pin a red rosette on a doctor shows how patronising…

Commons Confidential: Johnson’s showboat

Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster. 

The sex recession: How our love lives are stunted by hyper-sexualisation

It is wrong to assume that publicly talking about sex will necessarily lead to people having better sex lives.

How would Scotland work inside the EU? Five years on from Brexit, nationalists still don’t have a clue

Even as domestic support for independence has risen, there has been little agreement within the nationalist camp about what…

Alan Duncan’s Diary: Boris Johnson’s private life, horrible road signs and why the Tories are lucky

The Conservatives were blessed in the general election by Jeremy Corbyn, and much of the PM’s good fortune stems from…

Why we need a new global concert of powers

The UN’s permanent security council and the G7 no longer represent the world, so there is a gap in…

Letter of the week: A very British problem

A selection of the best letters received from our readers this week. Email [email protected] to have your thoughts voiced…

Labour is too weak to win and too strong to die

The Hartlepool by-election shows Labour is rudderless in an era in which cultural values, not class, shape voting patterns. 

Wild Mountain Thyme: anticlimax, slapstick and terrible accents

This Jamie Dornan-Emily Blunt romance is a film for anyone who found Ed Sheeran’s “Galway Girl” frustratingly short on…

The experts were right: Brexit is doing economic damage to the UK

It was Boris Johnson’s choice to prioritise “sovereignty” over the economy – and Britain is already paying the price.