How podcasts are reviving the excitement of listening to the pop charts
Unbreak My Chart and Song Exploder are two music programmes that provide nostalgia and innovation in equal measure.
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May's gamble
Guerrilla: this drama about the Black Power movement is a missed opportunity
The cast is incredible, but it plays with historical facts, arming its revolutionaries not with serious arguments, but with guns
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Lady Macbeth: the story Stalin hated reaches the movie screen
Lady Macbeth grows less psychologically plausible the higher the body count rises.
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The real meaning behind Jon McGregor’s village tale of a missing teenage girl
Each chapter of Reservoir 13 begins at New Year, as the local crime story morphs into an observation of the passing of…
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How Leonora Carrington fled privilege and the Nazis to live the surrealist dream
In this centenary year of her birth, Carrington is at last receiving the attention she deserves.
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Suzanne Moore: why Stuart Hall felt he was the “last colonial“
Stuart Hall analysed power, whether in conservative ideology or structural racism.
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Why Prince wanted to make his listeners feel inadequate
Prince aimed to make his listeners want to have him or be him. He did not like them to…
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Man in the mirror-ball: Simon Armitage’s The Unaccompanied
With this mature, engaging and empathetic work, the poet softens the pain of passing years.
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Quoting psychoanalysts – and other innovative ways of coming up with lines of poetry
Three new collections of poetry – by Emily Berry, Jacob Polley and Luke Kennard – test the limits of the lyric and…
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The Day That Went Missing: a memoir that breaks all the rules
Richard Beard’s book is brimful of anger and guilt, fails to deliver an uplifting ending and opens with a death.
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Paula Hawkins: a pulp-feminist follow-up on The Girl on the Train
Hawkins’s writing displays a suspicion of power, especially male power, though she is also eager to identify moments of…
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The end of solitude: in a hyperconnected world, are we losing the art of being alone?
In the end, Solitude feels a bit like an amiable cop-out.
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Mare Nostrum: The NS poem
The NS poem.
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John Bew: How the American dream ran out of gas
Tyler Cowen argues that Americans used their new-found wealth and prestige “to dig in”, protect themselves against risk, “and…
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Ode to a philistine: Howard Jacobson’s Pussy
As can be gathered from the title, Jacobson’s target is the current president of the United States.
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The decline of the Fifth Republic
With the far right and far left surging in the run-up to a defining presidential election, the French seem…
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Rehearsing for war
From the Middle East to North Korea, Donald Trump is reasserting US military strength and intensifying the rivalry among…
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Theresa May: the Brexit PM seeks a mandate
Theresa May’s great election wager.
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Commons Confidential: how the Queen feels about the missing Milibrother
Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.
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Syria’s broken people: how Assad destroyed a nation
Whoever leads the country after this conflict comes to an end will inherit not just the rubble and ruins,…
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The NS Q&A: Naomi Alderman on Oprah, Ovid, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer
“The worst things that ever happened to me were before I was 20.”
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It’s not every day a stark naked person tells you what you’ve done for Israel
I never learned the skill of being unselfconsciously naked in a room full of women.
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A new player has appeared. I would like to have his babies
Hunter Davies’s The Fan.
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The surprising truth about ingrowing toenails (and other medical myths)
Medicine is littered with myths. For years we doled out antibiotics for minor infections, thinking we were speeding recovery.
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Why Prince’s wife ate other people’s room service (and other Paisley Park tales)
She couldn’t afford to order her own on the $300 a week he was paying her.
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In the takeaway, a woman utters the worst sentence in the English language
Yes, even worse that “I don’t love you the way you want me to”.
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Yes, you could skip brunch and save for a deposit on a house. But why?
You’d be missing out.
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John Simpson: In Turkey, Erdogan’s aura of legitimacy has been weakened
If this was indeed a warning from the electorate, Erdogan is unlikely to go quiet and soothe the feelings…
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Labour will fight two campaigns: one to win, and one to avoid blame for defeat
Corbyn’s more pessimistic supporters and his opponents will fight a secondary election campaign: to convince the party membership that…
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Robert Webb: Prince Harry was right to speak about his mental health. No one should “man up“
The taboos surrounding mental health and talking therapy, particularly when it comes to men, remain very real to many…
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The greatest gamble for Theresa May was not calling an early general election
The Prime Minister has seized her best chance to win a super-majority. 2020 may not have been so favourable.
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Where Labour has no chance, hold your nose and vote Lib Dem
May’s gamble, MacKenzie’s obsession and Wisden obituaries – Peter Wilby’s First Thoughts.
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Leader: the French national crisis
All of the candidates – even Fillon, a socially conservative Thatcherite – can claim to represent change. Yet none appears…
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