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Welcome to The Apprentice 2015 blog: series 11, episode 1
It’s the 11th instalment of The Apprentice. And aside from a small reshuffle, the format remains reliably, appallingly the same.WARNING: This blog is for people watching The Apprentice. Contains...
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Why do players from independent schools increasingly dominate rugby in England?
National sports teams are drawing from a narrower pool. After years of preparation, it took just 15 days for England to be knocked out of their own World Cup. Yet the team’s defeats by Wales and...
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I spent three days at a refugee camp. Here's what I learned
Shabana Mahmood, Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood, reflects on her recent visit to refugee camps in Greece. What am I doing here? I asked myself that question a lot during the three days that I spent...
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The Returning Officer: Winchester
Robert Geoffrey Ellis was Tory MP for Wakefield (1922-23 and 1924-29) and Sheffield Ecclesall (1935-45). In between, he was MP for Winchester (1931-35). His Labour opponent was Dr R A Lyster, who...
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The new air strikes on Syria will compel even more angry young men to join...
Jihadists have long operated in the Caucasus and they have been re-energised by the Syrian conflict. When Russian warplanes began bombing in Syria, they achieved only one thing: more chaos in an...
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Commons Confidential: George’s Monkeys moment
I do trust a reporter will invite Sir George to recite the lyrics of Sufjan Stevens songs such as “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” or “Oh God, Where Are You Now?”.Regal airs and graces from George...
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Why Nasa is right to give up on searching for life on Mars
“Is there life on Mars?” seemed like an epoch-defining question. Is finding life on Mars all that important? Nasa doesn’t seem to think so and it might have a point. We have now seen signs of flowing...
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Reclusive novelist Dominic Cooper: what do writers do when the words no...
In 2013, a local paper reported on a strange script chiselled into a stone that had baffled not only historians but US code-breakers for decades. The mystery was solved when Cooper stepped forward and...
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How inequality became the defining issue of the 2016 US presidential campaign
Economic and social inequality is rising, threatening to eclipse even the levels of division seen in the “gilded age” of the 1920s.“I’s the time of year,” the economist Robert Reich wrote on social...
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Something to live for – a new fridge will be delivered today, some time...
The fridge has become, literally, unhinged. What now? So, last night the fridge door fell off. It was nearly bedtime and I was in my room when I heard it happen: a crash that went right through the...
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No renaissance for Mr Healey
A reflection on Denis Healey (1917 - 2015) in this piece from the NS archive from 1981. Nothing could be more brutally plain than that Denis Healey, one of the Labour movement’s principal chieftains,...
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Joseph Conrad and the lure of solitude
The sceptical doubt that infuses Conrad’s work – particularly his last great novel, Victory – has to do with the human world, which he believed was moved by illusions. “It was the very essence of his...
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Loving the crustacean: an unstable fantasy in dating dystopia The Lobster
The atmosphere throughout this film resembles that last, desperate, twilight hour at any nightclub. The coastal establishment that David (Colin Farrell) checks in to at the start of The Lobster could...
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My big fat Greek tragedies: on new productions of Medea and Oresteia
The decision to “Greek it up” for half a year has given the Almeida a bold and engrossing revisit to the creation myths of theatre. There has been a twist in the wine list at the Almeida over the past...
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All in the emphasis: how Marlon Brando turned his scripts from good to great
Does there exist one individual, radio-friendly, incontrovertible moment of Marlon Brando’s that perfectly transmits his genius? To a discussion about Marlon Brando on the Today programme (BBC Radio...
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Talking to Marlene, I thought: “How fat do you have to be before a plane...
It was indeed a terrible situation to lose your dream job because of excess baggage. The pool was really dirty but since I’d just arrived, I thought I should sit by it. It was a cheap motel....
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Allegory and humiliation on the BBC’s Secret Life of Books
Plus Abi Morgan’s new drama River – it should be so good, and yet it is so bafflingly bad. When Robert Harris and others insist the BBC needs a TV books programme, I always wonder what kind of thing...
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Leader: The SNP and the neverendum
While SNP politicians obsess about independence – which they like to say is a process, not an event – the party’s record in government is far from distinguished. A year on from the referendum on...
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For all the uproar among Labour MPs, Jeremy Corbyn is going nowhere
The Labour leader’s weakness among MPs is more than counterbalanced by his strength among members. The evening of 12 October 2015 will live long in the memory of Labour MPs. All sides still speak with...
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Abi Morgan on Suffragette: “These were voiceless women. We gave them a voice”
The screenwriter Abi Morgan explains why Suffragette spurned the story of the Pankhursts to focus on working-class activists. When she finished her first draft of Suffragette, Abi Morgan had a sudden...
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