State of Disorder

Leader: Rishi Sunak’s missing mandate

After three years of decline and drift since the 2019 election, the British people deserve their say.

Letter of the week: Time for a change

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

Ruddy-faced Boris Johnson still harbours hope of a comeback

Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.

Will China stop Russia going nuclear?

When Chinese diplomats say they want the war to end, they undoubtedly mean it – but not at any…

Sasha Swire’s Diary: Rishi Rich in No 10, lords-in-waiting, and a case of the green-eyed monster

It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than to get a seat in…

Gary Lineker: “The BBC can’t stop me talking about politics”

The Match of the Day presenter on impartiality, disapproval over his pay, and the freedom of podcasting.

Britain’s political chaos has turned it into an international cautionary tale

Italy shows how hard it is for a country that becomes a parable to overcome negative stereotypes

Politicians fixated on growth have led Britain into chaos

Leaders must accept that the old economic regime is over, or face further disgrace.

Rishi Sunak deserves not to be defined by his race – like everyone else

The indifference that most of the public feel about the first Asian prime minister is a mark of quiet…

Why have so many of England’s golden generation failed as football managers?

As Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard have learned, coaching is a specialist vocation, not an appendix to a gilded…

Why the novel matters

Against the “imperialism of the absolute” – a personal manifesto on the art of fiction.

From Louise Glück to Rachel Aviv: recent books reviewed in short

Also featuring Susan L Shirk on China under Xi Jinping and Ryan Gingeras on the Ottoman Empire.

The moral corruption of Holocaust fiction

John Boyne’s shameless sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas exemplifies a genre that expunges the genocide of…

How the Treasury quietly runs Britain

A new history of the department shows that, as Liz Truss discovered to her cost, its “abacus economics” has…

The women who made TS Eliot

Accounts of the poet’s brutal rejections of Mary Trevelyan and Emily Hale shed light on a man obsessed by…

The Spiceworld generation

Twenty-five years ago, the Spice Girls told Gen X to “move over” – and whispered feminist slogans to nascent…

Adam Curtis’s magic lantern through Russia

The documentary-maker’s new series shows how a country traumatised by the failures of communism and capitalism ended up with…

Fashion and fetishism: the drawings of Henry Fuseli

The artist’s renderings of women’s hair depict both the chic and the suggestive.

Triangle of Sadness is part satire of the super-rich, part disaster movie

Ruben Östlund’s second Palme d’Or-winning film charts a crisis on a mega-yacht – and appears to endorse what it’s…

Channel 4’s Made in the 80s shows how history repeats itself

High inflation, endless strikes, the spectre of nuclear war: it doesn’t take a genius to notice the painful similarities.

Is American democracy in danger?

In the first episode of Owen Bennett-Jones’s new Radio 4 show, the journalist investigates Russia’s attempt to meddle in…

UK politics is the same thing over and over, so why do we expect different results?

I barely remember a time when politics was not this inanely stupid.

Strength, lovely lips and superhuman skill: why Erling Haaland can’t be stopped

The wonder striker at Manchester City has scored 23 goals in his first 15 games for the club. Incredible.

This England: Fatal retraction

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

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Ranulph Fiennes Q&A: “John le Carré was my German teacher”

The explorer on his father, his memories of Mount Maunganui in New Zealand and the 40mph speed limit on…