We must love WH Auden or die
The poet was a restless spirit, haunted by his own Englishness
ByNon-fiction
Discover the latest non-fiction books and must-reads with the New Statesman’s expert reviews. Including biographies, music books, political writing and more.
Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and the death of the Hollywood dream
In the 1970s, an ingenious trio of film auteurs conquered Hollywood. But is the renaissance now over?
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The rise of British Muslims
What do two politicians’ memoirs reveal about the changing fortunes of British Muslims in public life?
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Melvyn Bragg’s class act
Was his success “social mobility”, or just good luck?
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Michael Pollan’s hunt for consciousness
We have it. Plants have it. Machines may soon have it. Why do they all need one?
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The breaking of nation-states
Utopian visions of an internationalist future ring hollow in dystopian times
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Gisèle Pelicot is not your hero
In her new memoir, Pelicot rejects the pedestal she has been put on
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Gavin Newsom knows he’s shallow
The California governor is honest about his own ambitions
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Nintendo: the company that consoled the world
The gaming corporation succeeded by shunning the slaughter and darkness that drives so many franchises
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How to turn breast milk into a cash cow
The market for erotic lactation, IVF and surrogacy is a morally complex world of desperation and exploitation
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The violence at the heart of the CCP
Frank Dikötter charts the rise of Chinese communism through its brutality. But does he undervalue the role of ideas?
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Uncovering Russia’s dark soul
The country’s vast woods have been overlooked in our understanding of its violent history
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Love in the time of AI
Young people are turning to AI chatbots for relationships they can’t find in the real world
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The dark side of the Enlightenment
Capitalism is far from the only extractive force in human history
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Syria, from the Ottomans to al-Qaeda
The country is still haunted by a long and fractured past
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Islam is the engine of world history
The religion may have transformed every corner of the globe, but it was also radically changed in the process
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The interwar years were as bewildering as the present
Alwyn Turner’s new history reassures us that the past is not, as many imagine, any cosier or more patriotic than…
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The best non-fiction to read this year
From memoirs by politicians to biographies of poets, this will be a year in which life-writing abounds
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Recovering the lost history of Gaza
Decades of conflict and displacement have obliterated the history of one of the world’s oldest human settlements
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How not to talk about capitalism
The more it penetrates our daily lives, the less we seem to understand the “system that runs the world”
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