Joan Didion without her style
The writer’s posthumous therapy journal is raw and unvarnished – the most direct book she never wrote.
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Joe Dunthorne’s lessons in chemistry
The novelist thought his great-grandfather’s memoir would be a story to be proud of. He found something else.
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NS Poem: Odysseus and Laertes
A new poem by Josephine Balmer.
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Josephine Baker’s French exit
The singer-turned-spy is just one of many 20th-century artists who fled American racism and escaped to Europe.
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What Russia can teach us
From Tolstoy to Shostakovich, Russian culture shaped Europe. We must not lose it.
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The best books of 2025 so far
From urgent new fiction to the inside story of Keir Starmer’s Labour, the New Statesman picks the season’s essential reading.
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This England: How do you steal yours?
This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s “Richard II”, refers to the whole of Britain –…
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Graydon Carter Q&A: “My hero is Bugs Bunny: there’s no one cooler under pressure”
The veteran magazine editor on a golden age for culture, Canadian hockey stars and Sgt Bilko.
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Subscriber of the week: David Skinner
Please email zuzanna.lachendro@newstatesman.co.uk if you would like to be featured.
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Brighton and Hove buses are great
While others dream of Machu Picchu or Mandalay, I dream of Hangleton or Worthing.
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Church and an all-girls school gave me great freedom to be uncool
Might we have been less competitive, less obsessed by body image, had our circle been diluted with boys?
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Easter eggs are a rip-off
Why do we always buy in to this annual mark-up?
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I am a long-lapsed Christian, but the rituals of Easter still draw me in
The cravings to fill the house with tulips and white narcissus are irresistible.
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The Return examines Odysseus’s last act
Ralph Fiennes plays the hero as a warrior shamed by his deeds and suffering from PTSD.
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Your Friends and Neighbours is doomed to languish unloved and unwatched
Jon Hamm’s Apple series could be a kind of cut-price update on John Updike’s Rabbit novels – if only it…
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Samuel Beckett’s art of reduction
In The Unnamable, the writer’s prose was stripped to the bone – and the bone itself boiled white.
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The best children’s books for Easter
From hidden jewels to good eggs, children will be delighted by these funny, moving stories.
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Katie Kitamura’s study of social dynamics
The novelist coolly examines how we interact with each other in a deeply unsettling story of reversals and doubles.
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Jensen Huang: the man who powers AI
The entrepreneur’s microchip company Nvidia has fuelled a tech revolution, but his success is built on failure and suffering.
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To catch a strongman
How justice caught up with the Philippines’ brutal president Rodrigo Duterte.
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