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From teeth to outer space
This is what human beings do. We wander over landscapes, whether terrestrial, cosmic or conceptual, looking for something different, better, more interesting. It is OK to be dissatisfied. Human...
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Pig-gate goes global, a nation’s guilt over Volkswagen, and standing in for a...
And so to the Frankfurt Book Fair. And so to the Frankfurt Book Fair. I’d managed to escape going for the past four years but this year I thought I’d better make the effort. My company, Biteback (the...
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How the home nations qualified
Northern Ireland and Wales will make their mark in France next summer. Have the home nations finally learned some of the footballing lessons they have been handed over the past two decades? First,...
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Reading the Pussy Riot act
Nadya Tolokonnikova, of female punk protest collective Pussy Riot, on the danger of UK conservatism, living in Moscow, and how the middle-class anti-Putin movement is waning.“Moscow calling!” The...
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The tragedy of James Bond
007 is still supposed to be a hero but if you knew him in real life, you would be warning all your friends not to invite him to their parties. There is something rather tragic about James Bond. In...
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Atypical girls: the women of rock in their own words
The question, “What’s it like being a girl in a band?” has dogged female rock musicians for decades. I wanted to make a programme in which they tell their own stories. They say that men and women...
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The Conservatives aren't planning a war on poverty - but on the poor
Defeat in the Lords could be the moment it all starts to unravel for the Tories, says Stewart Lansley. The Lords have dealt a hammer blow to the government’s plans for tax credits and the next round...
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Smug marrieds: has Sharon Horgan’s and Rob Delaney’s Catastrophe lost its edge?
To make a pearl, you need grit and I am wondering where that little bit of necessary sand is going to come from this time around. OK, I’m just going to whisper this and then I’ll run away: I think...
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Rumble in the jungle: how Heart of Darkness brought Orson Welles to the airwaves
James McAvoy brings a hardness that could shatter walnuts to Orson Welles’s Heart of Darkness on BBC Radio 4. An audacious radio adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella (24 October, 2.30pm) used...
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George Osborne’s fear principle, the perils of the eleven-plus, and why...
Even if grammar schools could eliminate social bias from their recruitment – so that each social class was represented in proportion to its numbers in the general child population – all would not be...
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Did an app get Jeremy Corbyn elected Labour leader?
The remarkable story of one man - and the invention that changed Labour forever. The campaign to elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour party was won in part thanks to the staggering number of...
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The NS Podcast #121: Girls in bands and tax credit cuts
The New Statesman podcast. We talk a taxing week for the Tories and women in rock and roll. (Anoosh Chakelian, Stephen Bush, George Eaton, Kate Mossman, Stephanie Boland) You can subscribe to the...
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Who speaks for Labour? The issue dividing Jeremy Corbyn and his shadow cabinet
Repeated policy divisions have left the party without a clear centre of authority. When Labour MPs and activists campaigned during the general election, voters repeatedly told them, “We don’t know...
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“I’m really, like, an expertise” The Apprentice 2015 blog: series 11, episode 6
The candidates have to do some weeding and put up shelves.WARNING: This blog is for people watching The Apprentice. Contains spoilers!Read up on episode 5 here. It’s early morning for the candidates,...
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No wonder “Generation K” loves The Hunger Games – they can't rely on...
Today's teenage readers don't trust authority or institutions and why should they? Adults have made an Orwellian nightmare of half of the world and set fire to the rest. The generation reaching...
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Time to swot up on chronic fatigue
Future general practitioners need to be made aware that “psychosomatic” should not be the default suspicion. Around 250,000 people in the UK suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as...
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Casualties of war in the world’s newest country
In the years since the end of the north-south war in 2005 a generation of South Sudanese had begun to grow up not knowing fighting. Now that is ended. There were no wounds on Nyachan’s body. She...
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The Returning Officer: Suffragettes II
The Dublin-born Norah Dacre Fox emigrated to England in 1891. The Dublin-born Norah Dacre Fox emigrated to England in 1891. She became general secretary of the WSPU in 1913 and was imprisoned several...
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Tony Blair’s not-so-smoking gun, Lord Lucan’s “left-wing” parents and Bond’s...
Bond's violence is only "moderate"? Yes, I know there’s eye-gouging in King Lear but at least you get great poetry with it. The financial troubles of Four Seasons Health Care, the country’s biggest...
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The legend of Sonny Bill
Sonny Bill Williams’s contributions outside of matches are even more memorable than his playing. Cut-throat professional sport is supposed to have little room for individualism. Nobody told Sonny Bill...
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