13 November 1998

Soviet communism collapsed because, among many other things, it had murdered millions, reduced whole peoples to poverty and degraded the environment. Nobody should mourn that monstrous system. Nor should anybody ... read more

Hasta la vista, baby Newt Gingrich, America's most unpopular politician, has finally got the message and stood down as Speaker of the House after the Republicans suffered an extraordinary ... read more

Friday My lower abdomen buzzes. Following the successful launch of our families policy discussion document on Wednesday, the Witchfinder General has set up a number of cross-departmental groups to look ... read more

"It's bloody disgusting. Half the cabinet is gay." "Then there's Robin Cook, who left his wife for his secretary."

"And did you hear that Cherie Blair bought a German oven ... read more

Seventeen ninety-eight was a marvellous year, the Lyrical Ballads and all. If we are looking at books and pictures, 1998 seems pretty good. In October we had Richard Holmes's second ... read more

The Secretary of State for Health is fond of likening the NHS waiting list to a supertanker. Frank Dobson introduced the analogy because waiting-list trends, like supertankers, take a long ... read more

The relaunch of the Women's Unit got hijacked by Geri Halliwell. Despite some good initiatives on income, employment and domestic violence, the headline topic was Ginger Spice. In fairness, Halliwell ... read more

Before modernisation caught up with the Palace of Westminster there were some old-fashioned shower cubicles near the barber's shop in the House of Commons. In the early 1980s a Tory ... read more

Gossip, so the Bible tells us, is evil. However, Shirley Brooks, a 19th-century editor of Punch, hit the other truth when he observed that "the love of evil is the ... read more

Amidst the large, imposing paintings in Robin Cook's office, there stands a more treasured work of art. It is a bust of the former Labour foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin. "This ... read more

Lord Marshall of Knightsbridge makes an unlikely green hero. Chairman of British Airways (one of the biggest companies in one of the world's most polluting sectors), former captain of the ... read more

My Mother The Queen - The Queen Mother -

Twin bulwarks and bastions bold -

Are not concrete blocks -

Nor disposable crocks -

But as ancient as Britain is ... read more

The meaning of the Pinochet affair appears to have been lost on some. Given critical support by the United States and Britain, the Chilean mass murderer was a beneficiary of ... read more

Management theory can suffer a bad name. Some Tories are ruing their party's apparent headlong dash into the very worst of business gurudom. There are those hateful weekends in Eastbourne, ... read more

The government is bending its efforts to support Gerhard Schroder, the German chancellor, against Oskar Lafontaine, his finance minister. The main agent in this intricate contest over ideology and for ... read more

As he announced the Anglo-American Corporation's merger with its Luxembourg-based investment company Minorco and their joint move to a new headquarters in London, the chairman, Nicky Oppenheimer, said it would ... read more

I take it we're not talking about family trips?Certainly not: these outings are no picnic. The intentional and public disclosure of someone's homosexuality, without permission, can be very damaging ... read more

Where did all the money go? Not so much those billions that disappeared from computer screens when the stock market began its downward slide in the summer. Rather, I am ... read more

Here in these pages, I have bitterly criticised those who insist that there has been little or no progress in British race relations. My detractors have pointed to a series ... read more

The deepening global economic crisis - which has now spread from Asia to Russia and may hit Latin America next - has exposed the poverty of the laissez-faire economic approach ... read more

A decade back - before the fall - Berlin was a stump of a city, heavy with history, noisy with ghosts. Squeezed tight into its concrete straitjacket - the Wall. ... read more

An Economists' Manifesto on Unemployment in the European Union (BNL Quarterly Review Sept 98 - contact Dennis Snower, Birkbeck College, 7-15 Gresse St, London W1P 2LL). As Europe is poised ... read more

What on earth is the Conservative Party's policy on the House of Lords? No one seems to know. Yet here, in light of Labour's unclear plans for a second chamber, ... read more

Thank you, faithful New Statesman readers, for all the nice letters I've received in the past week. I have to confess that I rather agree with the reader who lamented ... read more

Hurricane Mitch is causing the worst catastrophe this century in Central America. The authorities estimate that more than 7,000 people have died, and there are fears that the number of ... read more

When you're sitting there in the morning, munching your cereal and reading the back of the packet, do you ever wonder whether anybody is actually pathetic enough to send off ... read more

Fireworks? It's all a matter of attitude (Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Arts, 30 October). The Fiesta del Elche concludes with three hours of pyrotechnics, a brief blackout is followed by the firing ... read more

Francis Beckett ("Shrink the school, save the child", 6 November) overlooks several advantages of retaining sixth forms in secondary schools. First, many students need or prefer continuity of education by ... read more

Bob Woffinden is a journalist who is entitled to great respect. It is not hard to find victims of grave miscarriages of British justice in recent decades. Many of those ... read more

Joss Marsh's book Word Crimes is spoilt by factual errors; so is Adam Newey's review (Books, 6 November). The blasphemy law had not "become a dead letter" by the end ... read more

John Polkinghorne castigates Richard Dawkins for his meaningless view of the universe (Books, 30 October). I wonder what he makes of the disaster in Nicaragua? One of the poorest countries ... read more

Nick Davies' essay ("There is nothing natural about poverty", 6 November) gave an interesting picture of what is now called "social exclusion" on some urban housing estates. It remains a ... read more

Reading Cristina Odone's article "Ciao to la donna italiana" (30 October), I was annoyed at the comment about Italian feminists "who show off curves". Please try to be more culturally ... read more

For all the millions of words expended on Dolly the cloned sheep since her birth in the summer of 1996, most commentators have missed the main point. It isn't just ... read more

For someone who once seemed inescapable, Bruce Springsteen has had a peculiarly quiet time of it in the 1990s. It's a long time since he was almost the hottest property ... read more

It comes as a shock to a British critic's habitual complacency, but every now and then you realise there are whole chunks missing from our map of the film world. ... read more

There is a madwoman in the cellar of No 10 Downing Street. Her name is Margaret Thatcher. Her triple-stringed pearls are intact but her twin-set suit, though tightly buttoned, is ... read more

In their quest for demographic comprehensiveness, ITV's dramatists tend to turn to the eternal facts of life, love (by which they mean sex) and death (by which they mean murder). ... read more

Anyone floundering for a clue as to what the Turner prize is about should make straight for Disappearance at Sea by Tacita Dean, one of the four short-listed entrants ... read more

The insecurity of e-mail can be a wonderful thing. Someone at Microsoft writes an ill-considered memo, and within days it is sitting on Eric Raymond's website for the world to ... read more

"In the third week of November, in the year 1895, a dense yellow fog settled down upon London." Thus begins The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans, though it could be ... read more

"Nobody has ever been able to find out why the English regard a glass of wine added to a soup or stew as a reckless foreign extravagance," opines Elizabeth David ... read more

Three weeks ago, Auberon Waugh wrote the New Statesman diary. Characteristically, he used it to make a very clever joke (at least, I think it was a joke; you can ... read more

And so to Highbury, for my first Arsenal match of the season, in the flesh, or what passes for flesh. I parked outside the massage parlour off the Holloway Road, ... read more

I first went to Cairo 25 years ago. There was a steel boom across the Nile to impede floating mines, concrete blast-shields before the doors of public buildings and police ... read more

Demos, those clever begetters of the Third Way endlessly jostling for intellectual headroom in Tony Blair's ante-chamber, are now keen to show their independence as occupiers of the radical centre ... read more

You have to squeeze past the crowds outside McDonald's, negotiating your way round the giant screen broadcasting pop videos and the street sellers hawking Disney balloons, to see Lenin these ... read more

I was living in Norwich in 1994 when the city's central library went up in flames. There was something upsetting about this event; a feeling of loss, but also of ... read more

Art forms have to take their turns in the sun. Cultural studies departments and the weekend supplements might have us believe that the arts are some kind of homogenised, easily ... read more

No 3552 Set by Gordon Gwilliams

Cannabis is legalised. The advertising agencies go wild . . .

Apologies for setting 3554 twice. Apologies ... read more

The pruning gang from the borough council are hoovering up leaves all round me. It is a little square garden with a cherry tree. It was laid out where Halifax's ... read more

Helen doesn't like saliva. Whenever we accidentally meet in the basement room of Broadcasting House, which the BBC reserves for smokers, she somehow brings the conversation around to the way ... read more