Two poems by Kathryn Maris
“The adulteress” and “The H Man”.
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The Tory tide
Matteo Renzi, the scrapper in the swamp
Italy’s prime minister – “Europe’s last Blairite” – vowed to take on vested interests and smash open the economy.…
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Michael Gove, the polite assassin
The Messianic restlessness of the justice secretary.
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Want to know how you really behave as a doctor? Watch yourself on video
There is nothing quite like watching oneself at work to spur development – and videos can help us understand…
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Code breaking’s quantum leap – you have been warned
Our most secure encryption systems, such as RSA and elliptic curves, could be broken by quantum computing.
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Writing the PM’s report card
Anthony Seldon's books can have a teacher's approach. Cameron, 7/10. Blair, 6/10, see me after class.
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The kindness of strangers: the extreme end of altruism
When Larissa MacFarquhar told people she was working on a book about extreme altruists, she was asked the same,…
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Commons confidential: Blue v Blue
Blue-on-blue violence has escalated in the Conservative Party.
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Leader: The new politics
The defeat in the general election and then the arrival of an unexpected leader: MPs are grappling to understand…
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McDonnell’s environmental hazard, shifty stakeholders and my five days living like a Tory
I booked a cottage called Primrose Hall. I realised on arrival that I had committed myself to five days…
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The last days of the Nazi hunter
When Efraim Zuroff went abroad this summer, he visited about 25 sites of mass murder. “That’s how I have…
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The Tories are the zombie party: with an ageing, falling membership, still they stagger on to victory
One Labour MP in Brighton spotted a baby in a red Babygro and said to me: “There’s our next…
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In both business and sport, specialisation can increase efficiency – and blind spots
There is value in strategic looseness.
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Nightmare journeys, plumbers against the EU and the danger of life in the Labour Bubble
The slogan of the conference was “Straight talking, honest politics” but the real theme was modernisers v Corbynites.
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Promiscuous voters, Corbyn’s chances and why my Cameron biography wasn’t a hatchet job
One notion I would contest is that Call Me Dave was planned as a hatchet job. There is a world of difference…
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What lies beneath: how Europe succumbed to toxic ideology and violence
A review of Ian Kershaw and Heinrich August Winkler’s accounts of Europe’s “age of catastrophe”, 1914-49.
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XFM revived – and a nation put to bed
Chris Moyles has settled thoroughly into middlebrow white indie, positively tender compared to his days on Radio 1.
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The Returning Officer: Rusholme II
In 1933, Frank Boyd Merriman, the Tory MP for Rusholme, was appointed a high court judge. At the by-election…
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Why are right wing parties thriving across Europe?
The resilience of the right in Europe and the Anglosphere.
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The players make their mistakes on the pitch – I make mine on the page
I find that if I watch three live games in a weekend, which often happens, I have totally forgotten…
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Margaret Atwood on how an inspired polymath resurrected Native America’s epics
Robert Bringhurst and the rediscovery of the Haida mythtellers.
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Shock of the new: the books that were ahead of their time
Experimental writing is not always immediately appreciated. As the Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction announces its 2015 shortlist, we…
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She’s leaving home: the women who left North Korea
There is something unsettling about the western media’s fascination with North Korea, as these two books reveal.
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Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: partners in martyrdom
Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised biography confirms that, no matter how energetic his love life, Hughes’s obsession with Plath never faded.
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Nowhere man: the challenges of tracking down Shakespeare
Germaine Greer looks for the real Shakespeare in James Shapiro’s 1606: the Year of Lear.
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A night in my old room, with the sink, the Wisdens, and the prospect of “full genitality”
The mirror is still there, though, into which I would, as Nigel Molesworth put it, gaze at my strange…
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Must I unremember the day I wept over the long, slow suicide of a 27-year-old man?
At that time we did talk about the occupation of Ireland. Now we have to pretend we didn’t and it’s…
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The Walk is visual magic – one of the few films for which 3D is justified
Thanks to the success of Gravity, autumn is now the time of sophisticated cinematic spectaculars – hence the arrival…
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For the last time, please, bring back the plate
The slight lip around the edge is no mere bourgeois affectation; it keeps the food contained in its proper…
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Was there no one to stop Morrissey publishing List of the Lost?
Asking a decent editor to save this book would have been like asking a doctor to help a corpse that…
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Simon Schama’s The Face of Britain shows the portrait Churchill wanted destroyed
Without even looking at Sutherland’s portrait, Churchill decreed it “a remarkable example of modern art”, cue much sycophantic laughter…
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Bohemian rhapsody: Jeanette Winterson’s “cover version” of The Winter’s Tale
Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time is full of metaphorical riches.
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The politics of health: a clear-eyed account of inequality and the NHS
The Health Gap: the Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot reviewed.
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Beyond the frame: the best recent graphic novels
Neel Mukherjee is moved and unsettled by everything from psychological realism to ghost stories.
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I went to Guernsey for a walk but ended up playing tax-dodger dodgems
Guernsey Airport is pretty weird; but then, so is the rest of the island.
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A gift for John Berger
The art critic who contains multitudes.
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Forward Prize-winning poet Claudia Rankine on what it means to be black in America
“Only looking back do I gather up the moments.”
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