Women of the world, take over: the books we’ll be reading in 2018
Grime, Murdoch, suffragettes – and why it’s set to be a good year for women speaking out.
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Young vs Old
Armistead Maupin’s memoir Logical Family is a tale of a queer kind of optimism
The moving autobiography revisits late-20th-century gay history.
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The NS poem: Lima, Ohio; 1933
A new poem by Steve Kronen.
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Commons Confidential: The miserly Mr Davis
Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.
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Mary Beard Q&A: “Rome would have been ghastly for a woman without a fortune“
The classicist professor at the University of Cambridge talks Brexit, her Mastermind specialist subject and the best advice she’s ever received.
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For Spurs, Harry Kane is the gift that keeps on giving
The striker must know his team’s job is to provide opportunities – he should give Spurs another season, test out the…
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Queen wrote regular letters to their fans. I decided to analyse their handwriting.
Members of the Queen fan club circa 1990s may recall the quarterly magazine’s highlight was The Letter, a copy of…
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When living out of a suitcase, it’s important to shed as much weight as possible
“I have gone from being a totally sedentary man to one who dots about all over the place”.
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Take a leaf from Buddha’s book this year and enter the sublime states
Loving kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity – they might usefully be set as the guiding aspirations of any system of government.
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Radio 4’s adaptation of novel Offshore is marvellously layered
A tragi-comical story set among the houseboat community beyond Battersea in the 1960s.
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McMafia opens the year with a possible future for BBC drama
The manic new eight-parter about the globalisation of organised crime feels like it belongs on Netflix.
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All the Money in the World: the film from which Kevin Spacey disappeared
The reshoots may have cost around $10m but they’ve brought interest to a film that is, in most other…
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Why you should watch “noir sitcom” Search Party
The US hipster millennial comedy meets stylish, spiralling mystery is critically adored.
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How Call the Midwife smuggled radical social issues into Britain’s living rooms
One in six people in the United Kingdom now watch the moving BBC drama on the midwives and nuns of…
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Nostalgia is defining US politics – in 2018, it may become a weapon
“I can’t believe we still have to protest this crap!”
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Once Upon a Time in Shaolin: the bizarre story of the $2m Wu-Tang Clan album
How the “most hated man in America” made hip-hop history .
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All the Dirty Parts by Daniel Handler is an astonishingly obscene novel
The novel is a kind of plea that we should make our ideas of intimacy from more than porn,…
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How to lift a heart: the joy in protest and seeking political change
Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy by Lynne Segal, and Riot Days by Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina both talk finding…
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A look at Cavafy, Aeschylus and the poetry of Josephine Balmer
Letting Go and The Paths of Survival belong together: beautiful, modest in language and device, yet far from modest…
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The imperial ambitions of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg
How the social media giant ate the world – and what its creator will do next.
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Boomers vs millennials: the defining schism in UK politics
Brexit and the housing crisis have supercharged the divide between Britain’s young and old.
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The White Book by Han Kang: an unearthly, poetic tale of a life unlived
This novel is about trying to part with the burden of being alive because someone else has died.
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Why humans need to rethink their place in the animal kingdom
Books by Elena Passarello, Peter Wohlleben and Lucy Cooke explore our relationship with wildlife.
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The Dawn Watch: a look at Joseph Conrad as a prophet of globalisation
Maya Jasanoff offers a compelling examination of the great novellist’s life and work.
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A water-based religion: how fishing liberates the mind
For fishermen, even the smallest grayling lifted flashing from the water stands as a true image, a true sentence,…
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The strange rebirth of Silvio Berlusconi
Six years after resigning as Italy’s Prime Minister, and five after being convicted of tax fraud, the narcissistic 81-year-old is back…
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Automation may bring the realisation that we’re not hard-wired to work
Dubbed “the original affluent society”, modern humans could learn a lot from hunter-gatherers’ attitude to work.
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Meet Andy Batchelor, the man who keeps London dry
Most Londoners have no idea they’re being constantly protected by a team of people working round-the-clock to prevent the Thames from…
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Australia feels wealthier than Europe – but has yet to reckon with its past
The “lucky country” has sailed through the global financial downturn – the only developed economy to have avoided any annual recession…
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Julia Hobsbawm’s Diary: How algorithms, like sugar, are making us fat
The author of Fully Connected: Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Overload explains why she practises “Techno Shabbat”.
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Why Labour and the Tories are like Kipling’s tortoise and hedgehog
Each party seeks to emulate their opponent’s strengths.
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How Boris was usurped by “Bonus Johnson”
Jo Johnson’s appointment of Toby Young means he is no longer the more sensible of the Johnson brothers.
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Leader: Private affluence, public squalor
Britain’s surging rail fares inadvertently subsidise foreign governments, while austerity renders our infrastructure inadequate.
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