Football needs fans – so go on, make tickets free
Players say a good home crowd can earn them ten points a season. So why do ticket prices rise…
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The Boris Backlash
On stage, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing becomes fully formed
Adaptations are often lamented for not living up to their source material, but the Young Vic production of Eimear…
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Leader: The case against Mr Johnson
As much as Mr Johnson might wish otherwise, this referendum is about more than him.
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What kind of government sends widows and invalids home to their death for a poll boost?
We have to ask ourselves: can we bear to live in a nation where millionares are welcomed while the…
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The Tory split that Labour craved has arrived – but the party can’t exploit it
The opposition’s own divisions and Jeremy Corbyn’s euroscepticism leave it sidelined from the EU referendum debate.
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Why the struggles of white working-class children matter – and what can be done
White working-class failure in schools is a microcosm of a deeper problem: the struggles of the white working class…
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Commons confidential: Swivel-eyed Gove
Why Gove’s euroscepticism takes us back to the future. Plus: Zac Goldsmith, Labour plotters and Baroness Stowell’s iron fist.
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From a bullet to a drone, Anatomy of a Soldier tells the story of a wounded captain through the objects around him
I’d heard about what happened to Harry Parker in Afghanistan, and so at first I was a little nervous…
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What is the solution to gender inequality in the workplace?
Books by Iris Bohnet and Dawn Foster take divergent views on the problem of how women are valued at…
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It’s hard to meditate on the details of The People v O J Simpson once you see John Travolta’s eyebrows
Even when the series is gripping, I keep being distracted by Travolta’s weirdly unmoving face. Plus: The Night Manager.
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“The World at One”: A new poem by Kate Bingham
“The World at One”: A new poem by Kate Bingham
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The laughing Scotsman: Alex Salmond on LBC
Watching Salmond in the studio with Iain Dale makes it clear who’s running the show.
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It’s not Boris Johnson who threatens Britain’s membership of the European Union – it’s the migrant crisis
Pro-Europe campaigners are understandably worried that Johnson has come out for the other side. But events, not individuals, remain…
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Capturing the reality of life in the Syrian war zone
Two new books encourage us to look past the grand narratives and listen to voices on the ground.
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From pornography to surrogacy, too few of us are ethical consumers of bodies
When it comes to buying access to other people’s bodies, experience shows that it’s a buyer’s market: those with the…
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The young can experiment with “granny hair” – but I absolutely refuse to go grey
I know what you’re going to say: “Tracey, you’re out of step. Grey is cool now. Fashionable people dye…
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The BBC has never been a natural home for Eurosceptics – just ask the young Michael Gove
When it comes to the EU referendum, I don’t believe there’s systematic bias in the BBC – but neutrality will…
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Gorbachev could end the USSR – but not vodka
Attempts to ban the liquour in Russia failed, and Britain drank 9.9 million litres of it last year. But…
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Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City changes how we view artistic sacrifice
Laing’s book uses her own loneliness to consider a group of 20th-century figures who expressed their alienation through art.
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Master of reality: on Henry James’ non-fiction
James elevated the novel to a higher plane – but 100 years after his death, it’s his surprising memoirs…
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The voice telling me to open the till didn’t sound like a robber – more a bad actress playing a period heroine
He wasn’t a big guy. In fact, he looked like he’d have trouble playing Twister, to be honest.
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That “happy families are all alike“ line is rubbish – just consider Ian Buruma’s memoir of his grandparents
Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War is a personal story of two German-Jewish émigrés as they make a…
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The wine shop is closed, so I loiter outside the door, whimpering like a dog at his master’s grave
OK, there are other places to buy wine but they are not the same.
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In Hail, Caesar!, the Coen brothers go for brain laughs over belly laughs
A return to making movies about movies yields a breakthrough for the brothers as storytellers.
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Gold Fame Citrus is a “cli-fi” novel – the dystopia of choice in the era of climate change
Claire Vaye Watkins’s new novel imagines California after an ecological disaster. But what does it say about our interest…
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How our mobile phones and plastic toys help to prop up dictatorships
Leif Wenar’s Blood Oil skillfully reveals the link between the consumer goods we purchase and the violence with which their raw…
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As I sat in my small South London room, I surveyed the world’s maddest crowds
This week, I have decided to trust to algorithms rather than observation. I offer you Google’s top “lucky seven” maddened…
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I grew up in South Africa, so believe me when I say: Israel is not an apartheid state
This week on university campuses across the UK, activists are preparing for “Israel Apartheid Week”. This term is not…
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