What I learned about class after my twin brother and I were separated by the 11-plus
When my twin brother went into a secondary modern school, and I went to a grammar, something more than a…
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Spring Double Issue
Michael Bond, 91, on Paddington’s enduring appeal: “You feel you can talk to a bear”
In this archive interview, the creator of the marmalade-loving bear talks about rudeness, refugees - and working seven days…
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Rowan Williams on Stefan Collini: against the market in universities
Left and right alike seem to have nodded through the half-baked utilitarianism and economism of much recent policy.
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Tracey Thorn: How my parents met
They’d been introduced as pen pals through an uncle – my mum and her friend had written to this…
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A new John Burnside poem: To the younger man
I see you know the world’s way, all that slop and carrion of having, but not…
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“Mr Blair, You have nice hair”: the mighty pen of Adrian Mole, poet
Adrian Mole remains a beloved part of British life but, without Sue Townsend to write him, he ran out…
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Kevin Maguire’s Commons Confidential: Arise, Lord Lansman?
The best of the week's gossip from around Westminster.
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Is Line of Duty in danger of becoming a pastiche of itself?
How Jed Mercurio turns acronyms into utterly natural TV dialogue, and makes lanyards so damned sexy, are two of…
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NS Q&A: Sebastian Barry on Desmond Tutu, his mother’s best advice and his hero, RuPaul
The Irish playwright, novelist and poet answers our questions.
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This 85-year-old wants to climb Everest (again). Is it time to rethink old age?
Consider this. In 1914, the chance of a child living to 100 was 1 per cent. My son has…
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Rev Richard Coles: Brexiteers and Remainers alike could learn from the life of Jesus
“Now is the time to come together,” said Theresa May at the despatch box on 29 March. But how?…
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Remembering the great Darcus Howe, Gibraltar’s phoney war, and cricket’s brain freeze
Peter Wilby's first thoughts.
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How one woman’s murder made Argentina rethink the idea of “crimes of passion”
Campaigners are now using the word “femicide”.
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I’ll never regret the Monday I cracked open a £200 bottle of wine with my chicken liver pasta
My wine is, in a sense, constructed from memories – just as I am.
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Nude, flailing, racked with fear, I tore down the stairs and grabbed the can of No More Flies
I hate and am absolutely terrified of wasps.
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Donald Trump is no dove: three months in to Trump’s presidency, the dead bodies are piling up
“Hillary has blood on her hands,” some on the left piously proclaimed in 2016. Wait until you see what…
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“Making America Great Again“: A new short story by Lionel Shriver
At a Brooklyn dinner party everyone can agree that Donald Trump is a monster. Can’t they?
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Lives of the poets: new films explore the stories of Pablo Neruda and James Baldwin
Anyone frustrated not to be served the Pablo Neruda story straight can commiserate with those viewers who were hoping…
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Leader: the 100-year-life
Too often, ageing societies are treated as problematic. Yet past generations would have marvelled at our longevity
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Where are the Teletubbies, 20 years on?
“I literally couldn’t believe I had to work in this thing. That I’d signed a contract...”
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John Bew: the Gibraltar row shows “the balance of power” is back in European affairs
Those troublesome 1980s have reared their head again in a diplomatic storm in a teacup over Gibraltar.
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Jeremy Bowen: deadly Western air strikes risk creating the impression that Sunnis in Iraq are being carelessly slaughtered
In a complicated fight in a densely populated city such as Mosul, civilians will die. But under international humanitarian law,…
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Incurable romantics: Don Juan in Soho and William Wordsworth
Byron floats in the background of Nicholas Pierpan’s William Wordsworth and Patrick Marber’s Don Juan in Soho.
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My future was described to me in detail by a brisk man, in a town famous for making carpets
“You’re Ian McMillan!” he says, his finger jabbing the air between me and him. I nod. “You’re a poet!” he says. His…
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First violins are the strikers, cellos the grafting midfielders. And your conductor? He’s the coach, obvs
On the surface, orchestras are similar to football teams. Is it a fair comparison?
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The Tories have stopped talking about austerity. That doesn’t mean it’s gone away
Until 2020, inflation will erode the value of benefits, leaving millions of families feeling the pinch.
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How Alexander Chancellor’s magazine became the home of the British alt-right
Alexander was a brilliant and unconventional editor whose methods derived from Chinese Taoism: he achieved miracles while appearing to…
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From Kosovo to the May doctrine, when is it just to go war?
The co-author of Tony Blair's Chicago speech on the tests for intervention.
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Hari Kunzru’s White Tears: Even white boys gets the blues
A story of two obsessive record collectors becomes an interrogation of authenticity and the transformative power of music.
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How dating apps and Instagram became the unlikely tools for improving sporting performance
If players are hooking up on Tinder rather than in bars, that might have an advantage - they'll drink…
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Death of a dictator
How Caesar’s murder set the template for political assassination.
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Dear Google, please solve death
Meet the transhumanists who believe that the brain can outlive the body.
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From zombie parades to Stranger Things: why is our culture obsessed with monsters?
“A monster is a fear assuming a form” is a pretty neat definition with which to embark on a…
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Forget “digital detoxes”. Spring clean your online life instead
Step one: remove the app on your phone which takes up the most time.
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From antipasto to zoo, the A to Z of Brexit
We run through the Brexit alphabet.
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Ray Davies on understanding hipsters, not talking to Pete Townshend – and why he fled Tony Blair’s Britain
At the end of the interview, the Kinks frontman says, "You haven't asked me anything."
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Stop pretending an independent Scotland couldn’t join the EU
The SNP has a different set of questions to answer.
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The holy bun that crossed the centuries
When it comes to hot cross buns, I love nibbling round the chewy cross on top like an ill-mannered five-year-old.
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Why Britain should end the special relationship with the US
Gratitude for past US military assistance should not stop Britain from pursuing its own interests today.
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What is the future of artificial intelligence?
Google's artificial intelligence machine AlphaGo has had shockingly good results - but how AI should be used remains a difficult…
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Commons Confidential: John McDonnell’s Kapital concerns
Plus: Labour wars, sexist bores and Ashcroft's birthday bash.
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Academies offer a Tory lesson in power, a right royal snitch – and my vegetable love
On the Queen's views, Tory school reforms and the rising homeless population.
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What we learned from the first academic Archers conference
I sat with two of the organisers, debating whether all members of the extended Archer family were insufferably smug.…
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How do we decode the “Obama doctrine”?
Jeffrey Goldberg’s 20,000-word write-up of his series of interviews with Obama in the Atlantic makes for fascinating reading. But what…
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Leader: The end of the comprehensive
The plan to transform schools into academies is just the latest evidence that this government has no coherent education…
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What we talk about when we talk about millennials
When we speak about generational angst, we should not forget that we are really talking about class, and class…
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France and the UK must work together to combat the refugee crisis
Franco-British comradeship, anarchy at Shoreditch House and French grub in the Clink.
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Back Clinton if you think it’s the only way to defeat Trump, but don’t pretend she’s an LGBT champion
Why do so many gays, and so many British Labour types (particularly so many gay Labourites), enthusiastically support the…
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Can anyone else picture George Osborne as a robot car salesman?
Sexist cities, Obama’s killer bathtubs and why you should be listening to the New Statesman podcasts.
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Jane Eyre for radio? It’s a far cry from “Reader, I married him“
BBC Radio 4's adaptation made it sound like Jane and Rochester were in different rooms - and worse, they…
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My family are addicted to screens – and we’re all the closer for it
I’ve lost count of how many vines and gifs I’ve had to peer at on a teenager’s phone. Whatever else…
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Too close for comfort: Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk is very nearly greater than the sum of its parts
One of the most consistent pleasures of Levy’s fiction is her complete resistance to unthinking characters, unthinking female characters…
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The world of yesterday
Nostalgia and the socialist dream.
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The Returning Officer: Anna Barlow
A lifelong campaigner for peace and temperance, she said at an event for the Grove Retreat for Inebriate Women…
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Spring, the season of opportunistic muddle
As the climate changes, we will mourn the clarity of the idealised spring, whose business in nature is to…
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Reader, I stalked him: on Charlotte Brontë in her bicentenary year
A look at the time Charlotte Brontë spent in Brussels revelas a study in creative obsession.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates and writing about race in America
There's a reason why Ta-Nehisi Coates is currently one of the most high-profile commentators on race in the United…
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Putin’s breadcrumbs: tracing the last days of Alexander Litvinenko
A Very Expensive Poison: the Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia’s War With the West by…
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All 18-year-olds are brilliant these days. Men in their thirties remain as useless as ever
The young are much better than I was at their age; more socially attuned, more quietly confident, and with…
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News from nowhere
The Syrian artist Randa Mdah expresses the suffering of a people.
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John Gray on Philip K Dick: lost in the multiverse of history
In The Man in the High Castle – now a hit Amazon series – Philip K Dick imagines a…
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A century after the Easter Rising, we Brits should be less nervous about celebrating Irish history
And maybe, given the possibility of Brexit, even apply for an Irish passport.
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As House of Cards hits season four, the script has gone from unlikely to outright preposterous
Plus: why the ending of Happy Valley left me bereft.
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“Interesting about E and A”: a new short story by Helen Oyeyemi
Best friends and the Brontës.
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“Imminent catastrophe”: a poem by Clive James
“And though sometimes the weather is extreme / It seems no more so than when we were young. .…
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When WHSmith started selling porn next to the Kinder Eggs, I set out on a clean-up mission
Imaginative porntrepreneurs were starting to push the boundaries of what was acceptable, producing increasingly exotic titles such as Orgasms for…
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Happiness is a warm gun: on the novel that inspired The Revenant
Michael Punke's The Revenant may have informed last year's Oscar-winning film, but it is both more complex and more honest.
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Excess all areas: Jack Sutherland’s gripping memoir of pharmaceutical excess
Sutherland’s book is one of the funniest and least self-righteous works on addiction that I have read in a…
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How Hieronymus Bosch defied the ideals of an age
Living in an age of progress, Bosch sent his monstrous creations hurtling back to the Dark Ages.
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The Pearl Button seeks to reveal Chile’s suffering – but doesn’t quite hold together
Patricio Guzmán's films have brought the story of his country to the world. Yet this latest film lacks the…
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What would J G Ballard have made of the new High-Rise film?
Ben Wheatley’s screen adaptation of Ballard's novel brings its dry wit to the fore.
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Angels and minotaurs: the best children’s books for spring
Insects are big this spring, in many different guises.
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The eccentric brilliance of Annie Dillard, a latter-day Thoreau
In Dillard’s hands, sand is moulded into an entire world.
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How Arsène Wenger turned from football’s great moderniser into its stick-in-the-mud
Part of the fascination of Wenger’s Arsenal is the way an institution can come to resemble a dominant person,…
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Chris Robshaw – and why being a good follower is every bit as important as being a good leader
It’s a convenient refuge for coaches and bosses across sport and business, but “they’re all leaders” is analogous with…
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“Easter, 1916”: a poem by W B Yeats
First published in the New Statesman on 23 October 1920.
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