The BBC’s new Great Expectations is so bad it should be illegal
Steven Knight’s crass, sexed-up version of the novel strips it of all its humour and tenderness. Does he think he’s…
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A childlike wonder at the world’s everyday beauty is best left to grown-ups
I feel the more experience we have of the world – not less – the more deeply we feel what…
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The limits of humanism
How do we reconcile our capacity for good and evil? Humanist thinking does not have all the answers.
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From Skin & Blister
A new poem by Blake Morrison.
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Going native
How Matthew Goodwin became part of the right-populist movement he once sought to explain.
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God’s Creatures is a powerful portrait of a toxic mother-son relationship
Paul Mescal and Emily Watson bring inner darkness to this story of trauma in a tiny Irish town.
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Football was never a truly amateur game, but now even the supporting cast are raking it in
Tottenham Hotspur’s Daniel Levy currently tops the lot with a salary of £3.3m. Well done Daniel, and without kicking a…
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Subscriber of the week: Richard Hemmings
Please email peter.williams@newstatesman.co.uk if you would like to be the New Statesman’s subscriber of the week.
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Greying MPs and ministers hit the pension jackpot following Jeremy Hunt’s Budget
Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.
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The left can win and forge a new settlement – but only if it repairs the trust we have lost
Research reveals a strong public appetite for progressive ideas. But we cannot flourish in an environment of mutual intolerance.
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Despite the high risk, crypto offers a vision of a more open, creative and free internet
The industry is preoccupied with money-making, but the potential of shared computing could go far beyond finance.
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Like zombies, eurozone states are lurching towards their next financial emergency
A slow-burning crisis in which insolvent banks prop up insolvent businesses is a dangerous – and very real – possibility.
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An audience with the King, London’s pest problem, and why the English are afraid of the Scots
There was a hoopla in Colchester for the royal visit, with small children waving flags and a brass band.
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Cultural change is not enough to save the Met. Its very purpose must be overhauled
The blistering Casey report identifies failings across nearly all the force’s departments.
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The Cockfields is a genius, black-hearted British social comedy
I was hysterical with laughter watching this Diane Morgan-starring series from David Earl and Joe Wilkinson.
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How Noël Coward became the archetypal English success
A new biography shows how he began life as a revolutionary and ended it hosting the Queen Mother.
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Why we should break up the Met
The “bad apples” defence does not explain why toxic people are attracted to the police.
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Fifty years after Picasso’s death, we still struggle with the figure of the monstrous genius
The Musée Picasso Paris’s collaboration with Paul Smith attempts to reframe the great artist. Plus: another backlash for the BBC.
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Over Scotch eggs I am, to my shame, schooled in “The Pardoner’s Tale”
My friend Ben tells me the plot in such a way that I am suddenly inspired to read it, in…
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Thomas Hertog’s Q&A: “Stephen Hawking was the freest man I have known”
The cosmologist on learning to swim in Cambridge, travelling the Silk Roads, and why the future is bothering him.
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