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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. What justifies vengeance? What act is so despicable, so transgressive, that...
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Stephen Crabb replaces Iain Duncan Smith at the Department of Work and Pensions
The former Secretary of State for Wales has long been widely tipped for bigger things at Westminster. Stephen Crabb has been appointed Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, leaving his post as...
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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. I bring good news. I’ve found something for any politician looking for a universally popular,...
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How Arsène Wenger turned from football’s great moderniser into its...
Part of the fascination of Wenger’s Arsenal is the way an institution can come to resemble a dominant person, with the same blind spots and omissions. I got stuck on a metal gantry with Arsène Wenger...
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Iain Duncan Smith's resignation shows George Osborne's austerity model has...
The Chancellor must either abandon his surplus target or adopt a new strategy for achieving it. The surprise is that it did not happen sooner. When George Osborne entered the Treasury in 2010 and...
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The world of yesterday
Nostalgia and the socialist dream. Most of us who grew up in the Fifties and Sixties imagined that “nostalgia” was a chronic malaise of the right. We witnessed the end of empire and observed colonials...
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Too close for comfort: Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk is very nearly greater than...
One of the most consistent pleasures of Levy’s fiction is her complete resistance to unthinking characters, unthinking female characters in particular. Deborah Levy has long mined the seam of desire in...
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"It was really about Europe": Pensions Minister Ros Altmann blasts former...
"This really seems to be about the European referendum campaign. He seems to want to do maximum damage to the party leadership." Pensions Minister Ros Altmann has condemned her former boss Iain Duncan...
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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. As well as two volumes of poetry and two novels, Annie Dillard is the author of eight works of narrative non-fiction that have made her a star...
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"This is not the way to do government": Iain Duncan Smith lashes out at the...
The key moments from an interview in which the ex-cabinet minister stuck the knife into his former government colleagues. In an explosive interview on the BBC's Andrew Marr show, the former Work and...
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Shameful and shambolic: the worst of Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare legacy
The former Work and Pensions Secretary’s legacy to the welfare system is one of inefficiency, division, and cruelty. When Iain Duncan Smith – or IDS, as we know him – first took over the reins at the...
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Meet the women forced to choose between domestic abuse and poverty
Visa requirements are forcing hundreds of women a year to choose between abuse and deportation. When Mina arrived in the UK from Iran, she finally expected her basic human rights to be protected....
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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 Luke Harding reviewed. It is rare for murder victims to name their murderer. Usually they are...
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Female Friendship Week
Celebrating and examining friendships between women. Welcome to Female Friendship Week on the New Statesman website. Throughout the week, we’ll be celebrating and examining relationships between people...
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Do BFFs on TV give women unrealistic expectations of friendship?
Writing as part of Female Friendship Week, Emily Reynolds asks, are #FriendshipGoals making us insecure? It seems facile to compare TV shows like Broad City and Sex and the City. Despite the vaguely...
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When WHSmith started selling porn next to the Kinder Eggs, I set out on a...
Imaginative porntrepreneurs were starting to push the boundaries of what was acceptable, producing increasingly exotic titles such as Orgasms for the Over-Forties and Foreplay for Your Silver Wedding...
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Chris Robshaw – and why being a good follower is every bit as important as...
It’s a convenient refuge for coaches and bosses across sport and business, but “they’re all leaders” is analogous with adding “executive” to everyone’s job title. Chris Robshaw, sacked as the England...
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DWP letters telling people to call the universal credit helpline are ripping...
“In the space of a month I wasted £7.12 on the phone to them about this unnecessary letter. I had to live on £34 a week for six weeks, and I have two kids. It’s a joke.” The jury is out on whether Iain...
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Celebrate Iain Duncan Smith leaving, but don't let that distract from the...
What's needed is a change of policies, not just a fresh face. Sometimes I wonder how people ever coped with breaking news before Twitter. When a sudden news story breaks, be it resignation, reshuffle...
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“The technology is just a shiny shopfront”: the case against the sharing...
Uber isn't special because it has an app – it is special because it has billions in venture capital funding behind it. Tom Slee, a British-born software designer, lives in Waterloo, Ontario, a place...
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