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Promiscuous voters, Corbyn’s chances and why my Cameron biography wasn’t a...
One notion I would contest is that Call Me Dave was planned as a hatchet job. There is a world of difference between mischief and rancour. The things one worries about are seldom the things that come...
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Shifting sands: The Loney is a novel of “eerie England”
The more interconnected we become, the more detached we are from the soil that spawned us – and the more portentous our indigenous myths seem. Much has been written of late about the genre of folk...
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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 the new world in which they find themselves. Jeremy Corbyn knows that he is a leader...
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“Chariots of Fire meets Cool Runnings?”: The history of a bobsled team
Andy Bull’s Speed Kings is about the 1932 American Olympic bobsled team – and reminds us how mortality underlines all sport. Sport means more when there’s a whiff of death in the air, when there is a...
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The winners of the Labour conference
Those who leave Brighton with most to be cheerful about. John McDonnell, Shadow chancellor After his divisive appointment, the shadow chancellor shored up his position through a rapid charm offensive....
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Jeremy Corbyn and the nirvana fallacy
A politician who uses the nirvana fallacy gains an easy rhetorical advantage. But it's a double-edged sword. On the morning after his first address to conference as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn was...
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Law students had to help a man in debilitating pain fight being declared "fit...
Disabled claimants are increasingly vulnerable, with justice more difficult to access, and the need to be reassessed after being declared "fit to work", The first Paul Crane knew of having his...
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It's not enough simply to get women out of forced marriages
A few arrests, a good news story here or there...but all too often when it's over, the survivors are left to fend for themselves. Channel 4 will tonight air a documentary about a subject which remains...
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Below the surface at the Labour conference, all sides armed themselves for...
The party emerged from Brighton surprisingly unscathed. But no one expects the calm to endure. At the 1981 Labour conference in Brighton, Neil Kinnock found himself assailed by a young Tony Benn...
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The Goldsmiths Prize 2015 shortlist
A debut novel invoking Ted Hughes’s Crow joins an all-male shortlist for the influential award for innovative fiction. A slim debut novel about a bereaved Ted Hughes scholar visited by Hughes’s poetic...
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Politicians’ privates, the Daily Mail’s gentility and Cameron’s “declinable...
What a strange country. Most of us associate pigs with bacon and sausages but Corbyn won’t eat them, while David Cameron has allegedly molested a dead one. What a strange country we live in. At last,...
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The Returning Officer: Rusholme
The shipowner Robert Stoker won Manchester Rusholme in the 1918 election but died less than a year later. John Henry Thorpe, the father of the future Liberal leader Jeremy, held the constituency for...
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Let's sing the praises of the Greeks
Greeks bearing gifts? Go into a Corfiot restaurant today and your meal will invariably be rounded off with a pudding or a liqueur, on the house. Let’s sing the praises of the Greeks. Not the ancient...
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What do the focus groups make of Jeremy Corbyn?
He is authentic and principled - but where's the money coming from?Five things we learned from Corbyn’s conference speech While the reaction to Jeremy Corbyn’s speech on Twitter was very positive – of...
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The daughter’s first tattoo: a battle of wills, and memories of a Microsoft...
The Girl has outmanoeuvred me yet again, but then again I told my children that my main job as a father was to make sure that they turned out smarter than me. I am sitting in the Hovel, waiting,...
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Matthew Spender’s dreams from his father
Stephen Spender’s is a life well documented. Now his son has written about him. Stephen Spender’s is a life well documented, as much by his own hand – in a memoir and novels that qualify as thinly...
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The Italian psychiatrist who ended the age of the mental asylum
As John Foot makes clear in his fascinating account of the life and times of Franco Basaglia, Italy’s “anti-institutional” movement did not deny the existence of mental illness. In 1961, my aunt was...
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How to curate the human fate
It’s hard to know whether calls for “urgent debates” actually work - especially as people are already doing it. It’s hard to know whether calls for “urgent debates” actually work. Nonetheless, here’s...
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Quiet carriage, window seat, forward facing
Today, trains are much faster than they were in my childhood, yet glimpses of that natural order can still be gained, between the urban sprawl and the new “business parks”. When I was a child, every...
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Why Jeremy Corbyn should be drawn as a Jacobin in the French Revolution
On the “misérables of the left”, and Vicky, the great NS cartoonist. How would Vicky, the greatest cartoonist in the history of the New Statesman, have drawn Jeremy Corbyn? My guess is as a Jacobin in...
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