Magazine

Nick Drake’s dark places

The songwriter is revered as a tortured genius – but Richard Morton Jack’s new biography shows that behind the romantic…

I hate every minute of the “dream boys” stripshow, except, that is, for the ones I love

“I miss your normal body,” I later texted my boyfriend, having survived one of the most conflicting nights of my…

Peter Turchin’s empty prophecies

The social scientist has made a career from predicting global instability. But in the new book End Times, his analysis…

A trip to the GMB sofa and a lesson for lying politicians

Also this week: awkward encounters at my book launch and Prince Harry takes on the Mirror.

I refuse to feel shame after eating – but it saddens me that so many women still do

I thought moralised comments about eating were a thing of the past, but then I went on a girls’ holiday.

Britain is not the sick man of Europe – that accolade goes to Germany

To survive in a modern, digital world, the German economy requires not a green transition but a full-scale revolution.

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Keir Starmer dodges the toff uniform of top hat and tails during his day out at the Epsom Derby

Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.

Letter of the week: Intellectual stimulants

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

Letter from Marseille: the lawless metropolis

Riven by violence and drugs, France’s second city is descending into anarchy.

Marina Litvinenko: “I’m glad to talk about him – it feels like a duty”

The wife of Alexander Litvinenko on Putin, Peter Morgan’s Patriots and depictions of her husband’s assassination on stage and screen.

This England: Muscle man

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

The Reeves doctrine: Labour’s plan for power

She is ready to be Britain’s first female chancellor. But will Rachel Reeves’ caution stifle her creativity?

Labour will inherit the chaos of the Covid inquiry

Divisions are plaguing the whole country, and are rooted in personality and populism, not policy.

Labour and the return of the state

Is Labour’s ambition to transform Britain’s economic and social model or merely to manage it more competently than the Tories?

The new age of perfectionism

Is capitalism itself causing millennial burnout?

The NS Poem: Rotterdam

A new poem by John Kinsella.

On a trip to Poland, I am reminded that my heyday has been and very much gone

A friendly man about a year older than me, turned and said: “You were an icon of the Nineties.” A…

The ultra-processed food swindle

Engineered to trick our taste buds and appetites, artificially produced food is ruining our health and damaging our children. But…

Frieda Hughes’s Q&A: “The Bible taught me everything”

The poet and painter on motorbikes, frog migration, and why all politicians are children.