Summer special

No wealth but life: the conservative origins of English socialism

How our writer was prompted to reflect on the ideology’s beginnings, after the experience of life in lockdown exposed the legacy of…

The media’s fixation on Team GB has reduced the Olympics to a display of parochial nationalism

The BBC – reflecting the priorities of its audience – has reimagined the greatest sporting pageant on Earth as…

It’s still possible to “cancel” gender-critical feminists, but this strategy won’t work

The commercial success of two new books shows how what were once controversial ideas can become mainstream. 

The Tory crime strategy is either lock them up or lock them down − and neither one is working

We face an imminent crime surge, but our government is more concerned with protecting monuments than citizens. 

This will be a century of extreme weather events. Our politicians are failing to face the challenge

Boris Johnson needs to recognise that flooding could be better controlled if our tattered national infastructure was fixed.   

Howard Jacobson’s Diary: Soho never sleeps – so I escape to see the rides at Brighton Pier

My wife and I take the train to the coast, where we admire those brave enough to be spun upside…

Editor’s note: The cost of war in Afghanistan, remembering the New Cross fire, and Orwell visits Essex

Twenty years after the US invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban seems stronger than it has ever been and its leaders are…

Concerning the common nature of all

A book saved from a library in Seoul during the Korean War has finally returned home, bringing with it…

Lucy Kellaway’s Re-educated is a breezy memoir about changing her job, house and marriage

This is three books in one: a tongue-in-cheek account of one woman’s midlife crisis, a dissertation on modern education,…

Reviewed in short: New books by Alwyn Turner, Mary Gaitskill, Paul McVeigh and Luke Kennard

All In It Together by Turner, Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Gaitskill, The 32, edited by McVeigh and Notes on the…

The best children’s books of the summer

Featuring moths, maids and mermen. 

Echo and the Bunnymen before the killing moon

Guitarist Will Sergeant on growing up poor and embracing post-punk in Seventies Liverpool.

How history haunts the present

This tumultuous age demands that we rethink our relationship with the past.

Whose freedom?

 A major new work of feminist philosophy opens up debates about sex, pornography, justice and liberty. 

The greats outdoors: how Caspar David Friedrich searched the German landscape for reflections of his soul

How Friedrich’s late masterpiece, The Great Enclosure, offers us a glimpse of the artist’s inner life.

Steve McQueen’s docuseries Uprising is painful, uncompromising – and exhilarating

Like all good oral history, this series about the New Cross house fire and the Brixton riots doesn’t prettify, and…

The podcasts making sense of the #FreeBritney movement

After her appearance in court, a flurry of podcasts on Britney Spears’s conservatorship seek to explain how and why…

The Courier is morally clear-cut and severe

This otherwise conventional spy story starring Benedict Cumberbatch suddenly morphs into a different kind of movie in its final third. 

An anarchist on the Riviera

Henri-Edmond Cross envisaged the Mediterranean as a utopia for the deserving working man.

How Marvel conquered culture

A Star Wars geek turned the debt-ridden comic studio into a cinematic juggernaut – and became the most powerful…

How FC Barcelona turned an alternative club culture into sporting genius

Barça’s history comes wrapped in legends – or are they myths? 

Caitlin Moran Q&A: “I owe Nye Bevan almost all of my pain-free wazzing“

The journalist discusses Laura Bates’s Men Who Hate Women, Jim Henson and town planning. 

Email [email protected] if you would like to be the New Statesman‘s Subscriber of the Week. 

A biotech firm is trialling the holy grail of cancer tests – but for now we must live with uncertainty

If successful, the Galleri trial could be revolutionary in helping the NHS to detect the early stages of cancer in…

This England: Flopping out

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

When I first saw my face on the side of a building, I couldn’t quite believe it was real

I don’t mean like an image of the Virgin Mary in an Italian hill town, visible only to true…

In Brighton, you never know who might run into you. Or who might run you over…

One of the most delightful things about Brighton is that every bus has someone’s name on the front, resurrecting…

Holidays abroad may be off the menu, but the UK has plenty to offer the food tourist

Take your pick from a host of fishing museums, orchard tours and gloriously eccentric food museums. 

Pensées by Bryan Magee

The late Bryan Magee, populariser of philosophy and communicator of complex ideas, grappled with the fundamental questions and mysteries of…

Bridget Jones and the Blair years

Bridget Jones’s Diary is a relic from New Labour’s peak, when Working Title films were weapons of British soft…

Tom Nairn: The prophet of post-Britain

With the Union on the brink, the radical nationalism of the Scottish intellectual seems more prescient than ever.

Rory Stewart is on the road again

After runs for the Tory leadership and mayor of London, the former cabinet minister is criss-crossing continents. Could he…

Summer is the season of longing

I think of the summer swifts, those tiny intercontinental airships dreaming of warmer places; longing, like us, to take…

The West isn’t dying – its ideas live on in China

What the Western world confronts is not the threatening advance of alien civilisations, but its own dark shadows moving…

Timothy Gowers: The man who changed Dominic Cummings’s mind on Covid-19

The Cambridge professor on how pure maths underpins the modern world. 

First Thoughts: Act now on the climate emergency, “I’m with Bonkers”, and the perils of altruism

After wildfires devastate California and commuters drown in China, it is obvious to me that Extinction Rebellion is right. 

Commons Confidential: Carrie Antoinette

Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.  

Why cutting Universal Credit is even worse than you think

The £1,000-a-year cut would increase child poverty, damage economic growth and intensify regional inequality.