Putin’s Endgame

Labour’s tax illusion

The world has changed, and policy must change with it.

Letter of the week: Debasing the database

Write to [email protected] to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman magazine.

“John Swinney is no Jack Sparrow”

Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.

“Adolescence” isn’t shocking

There is nothing fictional about the Netflix series – it simply depicts the world women have to live in.

What diplomats really think of our leaders

Also this week: Doing the plank with David Cameron and Shakespeare in the age of AI.

Mark Fairhurst: “I do not fear the law. I will accept the consequences”

The national chair of the Prison Officers’ Association on the next prison officers’ strike.

As the literary novel fades from relevance, James Graham is the writer for our era

The author of Dear England has channelled the people and events that made modern Britain.

The White House’s leaked group-chat disaster

Also this week: Rachel Reeves’ digital tax delusion and X as an arm of US foreign policy in Turkey.

How gender ideology corrupted government data

Blurring the line between sex and gender has serious consequences.

The Democrats’ toothless resistance

Liberals’ moral outrage only masks their allegiance to an amoral status quo.

The EU is becoming an engine of war

Building the union was never a “peace project”. But European hard power is now its leaders’ greatest priority.

Norman Lewis’s secret 20th century

In wartime Naples or Castro’s Cuba, the inconspicuous writer-traveller was a vivid chronicler of unseen worlds.

The NS Poem: Facebook Marketplace

A new poem by Andrew McMillan.

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s lessons in humanity

Theft, the Nobel Prize winner’s new novel, is full of wisdom and free of judgement.

The Yoko Ono problem

As David Sheff’s new biography reveals, decades of suspicion aimed at the provocative artist, musician and widow have obscured…

The cyclical history of abortion rights

The past has been marked by periods of acceptance and intolerance of women’s bodily autonomy. Can it offer lessons…

From Russell Shorto to Xiaolu Guo: new books reviewed in short

Also featuring Affairs: True Stories of Love, Lies, Hope and Desire by Juliet Rosenfeld and The Story of Witches:…

Munch the social animal

The painter’s portraits reveal less a tortured loner than a man who thrived in company.

The fascist afterlife of The Four Seasons

Vivaldi’s masterwork, forgotten after his death, found new popularity when it was co-opted by Italian nationalists.

Joshua Oppenheimer’s surreal apocalyptic musical The End

This strange film, starring Tilda Swinton, satirises our collective delusion in the face of the climate crisis.

This City Is Ours: a highly superior Scouse Dallas

This series, starring Sean Bean, is the perfect combination of menace and farce. And the accents, the clothes, the…

Tax doesn’t have to be boring

Dan Neidle’s Radio 4 show Untaxing reveals how our system is failing us – through the parable of Jaffa…

Why the once-maligned egg is now ubiquitous

Fears of high cholesterol and salmonella created a culture of distrust that took years to crack.

Thought experiment 9: Mary’s Room

The Australian philosopher Frank Jackson used the tale of a colour-deprived prodigy to argue for a world beyond the…

In defence of cabaret-style seated gigs

There’s something about crowding round tables at a concert that conjures conversational magic.

I gave up on a work ethic at school and never looked back

I’ve been fighting the grind ever since I was first given homework.

This England: Well, this is hawkward…

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

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Anne Sebba Q&A: “A spark of humanity is enough to ignite the will to live”

The author on Ernest Shackleton as maverick and a year in Rome in 1972.