Spring Special 2024

Britain’s long search for growth

Since the financial crash the UK has failed to reinvent its economy. Can Labour break the cycle of low…

Letter of the week: Where water privatisation leads

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

Ambassador Farage opens door to Team Trump for Lammy

Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.

An ICC warrant for Netanyahu will divide Europe

A call for the Israeli leader’s arrest – just as Ireland, Norway and Spain move to recognise a Palestinian…

The Clarksonification of the countryside

Also this week: AI enters the classroom, and the British obsession with gardening vs Brexit red tape.

Labour’s Yuan Yang: “There is deep class anxiety in China”

The parliamentary candidate on her journey from the Financial Times to politics, and how the country of her birth…

What the left and right get wrong about the politics of family

Marriage, children and what constitutes the good life have become America’s most divisive culture war.

Rishi Sunak’s right-wing pantomime impresses no one

The Prime Minister’s performative populism and unending U-turns are acts in a music-hall farce.

The Labour PR gold rush has begun

The banks, lobbyists and public relations firms are all lining up to cash in on a Keir Starmer premiership.

What we must learn from the infected blood scandal

This failure and its cover-up reveals the harm done by the NHS’s “institutional defensiveness”.

The rise and decline of the No 10 Policy Unit

Fifty years ago, Harold Wilson instituted the team of advisers that would help shape modern Britain. Will Keir Starmer…

The myth of progressive Catholicism

Not even the will of God can keep the culture wars out of the Vatican.

Trapped by apps

Thanks to the digitisation of everyday essentials, we waste a far greater proportion of our lives on admin than…

Inside the mind of Franz Kafka

A revelatory edition of his diaries and a new biography upend the simplified myth of the anguished writer.

The NS Poem: Civet de Cerf

A new poem by Pascale Petit.

In defence of the new Luddism

The AI boom poses a threat to copyright, privacy and human rights – but no technology should be above…

Colm Tóibín’s genre trouble

The Brooklyn sequel Long Island is a rich tale of secrets and betrayal. Is it more than a romance…

The lure of the English garden

Olivia Laing and Richard Mabey reveal the joys, crises and politics of making a garden of one’s own.

Virginia Woolf’s politics of peace

Published between the wars, Woolf’s essay Three Guineas still has lessons for today’s conflict-ravaged world.

From Sarah Harkness to Roger Crowley: new books reviewed in short

Also featuring The Invisible Doctrine by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison and Everything Must Go by Dorian Lynskey.

Writing America, from the outside

Succession is a show about the heart of US power, created by a non-American. Is that wise, or even…

The drama of Carlo Gesualdo

The vocal ensemble the Gesualdo Six on the Renaissance composer’s arresting and daring works.

The theatre and the misery of VAR

The refereeing technology has made football a better TV sport – and ruined the live game.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the franchise’s grandest, most expensive yet  

If you’ve ever relished a Mad Max film, make sure to see this one at the biggest, loudest screening…

The BBC’s younger, sharper Rebus

This new adaptation – the bastard child of early Taggart and Happy Valley – reimagines Ian Rankin’s detective.

Olivia Rodrigo’s guts-spilling, rabble-rousing tour

At London’s O2 arena, the 21-year old singer is at her best – and most distinctive – channelling anger and…

Tate Britain’s revelatory exhibition of women artists

This extensive survey contains an intriguing array of forgotten works across multiple disciplines.

The Chelsea Flower Show goes green

A focus on rewilding and sustainability has not diminished what the world-famous garden show does best.

Whooping cough’s deadly epidemic cycle

When the baby stopped breathing and started turning purple, I saw the real effect of this persistent disease.

I’m good in a crisis, but not if that crisis is a lost passport

I am off on a travel-writing gig to e-bike in Lower Silesia, or at least I am meant to…

Not all memorable meals should be photographed

At a Tennessee breakfast spot, I was so ashamed by the scale of what I was about to consume…

A dramatic Premier League finish – plus Postecoglou, pin-ups, and a distinguished pigtail

Man City win again, but at least I can produce a shock in my end-of-season awards.

This England: Up, boy! Up!

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

Please email [email protected] if you would like to be featured.

Cerys Matthews Q&A: “What’s bugging me? Superfluous adjectives”

The musician and broadcaster on Pippi Longstocking, the extraordinary life of Fridtjof Nansen and the poetry of Dylan Thomas.