27 November 1998

The row over the House of Lords, in which an aristocracy springs forth as a defender of democracy, sometimes seems worthy of one of those ancient philosophical conundrums about Cretan ... read more

Left behind? British government officials sent Eurosceptics into apoplexy by backing deeper integration between the socialist governments of the EU. They helped draw up a manifesto entitled The New European ... read more

Tuesday When I arrive back from the House, the images of the Queen reading The Master's speech still vivid before my eyes, M is already in my room sipping an ... read more

In the House of Lords some of our peers are having a ball. They sense they have won the argument. They know they are privileged and want to hold on ... read more

I'm in Santiago, Chile, to make a short documentary for BBC 2's Correspondent programme. On Wednesday, it seemed as if the whole of the country had stopped and was holding ... read more

The welfare reform bill heralded in the Queen's Speech this week is likely to prove a watershed in the life of the government. Either the government takes seriously the consultation ... read more

The moral high ground on the family, once a preserve of the right because of its perceived greater respect for the institution of marriage, has now been appropriated by new ... read more

Delia swears by her shayler;

It cracks any canful of worms;

In cybernet caffs it turns over the gaffes,

And scratches the surface for germs.

Delia claims that her ... read more

The trial of the world's most prolific serial killer began this week. Known as the Terminator, Anatoly Onoprienko is thought to have murdered 53 people, many of them small children. ... read more

There is no five-year period this century when the stock market has not gone up. The FTSE-100 index finished 1987 higher than it started, crashing in time to recover by ... read more

Kwame Toure, formerly Stokely Carmichael, died last week, aged 57. Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson apart, he was perhaps the leading black revolutionary activist in the United States in ... read more

When it was announced last week that Britain's remaining grammar schools would each be subject to votes in their catchment areas on the question of selection, a little voice inside ... read more

It was a pity that, in all the recent remembrance of the first world war, there was nothing about the press. In 1917 the prime minister, David Lloyd George, confided ... read more

"It's that man again,it's that man again" - ITMA, BBC Radio, 1939-1949

In the midst of wartime grimness, the ITMA carnival was a much-needed antidote to Hitler-induced human tragedy. ... read more

David Shayler is a fat, jolly chap who wants to blow the whistle on his hard-drinking former colleagues who work in what he says is an inefficient security service, MI5. ... read more

God, as we all know, is an Englishman. Having thus resolved the nationality and gender issues, only one big question remains: is He also a Tory? William Hague would like ... read more

Is America becoming a fascist state? Before you think I have regressed to the cliches and nihilistic political vocabulary so beloved by many of my fellow Essex University students of ... read more

The Eurosceptics are right. It is time for a bare-knuckle fight about what we really believe; the kind of people we are and want to be. This country is on ... read more

Down But Not Out: Japan and the world in crisis (British Institute of Contemporary Economic and Political Studies, Bowling Green Lane, London EC1R 0NE, e-mail: biceps@btinternet.com). As western governments ponder ... read more

One Friday evening, an asylum detainee in Campsfield House Detention Centre, Oxfordshire, is called on the tannoy: "K . . . to immigration. K . . . to immigration." The ... read more

The row over the Euro elections disguises a deeper malaise in British politics. This is the failure of political parties to renew themselves to match modern needs.

If Benjamin Disraeli ... read more

The streets of the Lancashire mill-towns are full of old people now. If there is a certain melancholy as they look out on to the car parks and rectangles of ... read more

The New Statesman has created two of the great popular movements of modern Britain - the first being the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1950s, the second Charter 88, ... read more

If you could just remind me who . . .Rhodri Morgan is the Labour MP for Cardiff West who stood, and lost, against Ron Davies for leadership of the ... read more

The other day I read the New Statesman's recent supplement on lifelong learning. Somebody had rung up various famous people and asked what they had learnt since stopping formal education. ... read more

Janet Scott, president of the transvestites' campaign group the Beaumont Society, said: "This transvestite was asking for trouble and I have no sympathy with her."

Ms Scott, born a man ... read more

As an American long resident here, I find more sense, more wisdom in Alistair Cooke's reports about my country than in any other single point of view. Quentin Letts ("Please ... read more

Although Steve Richards' analysis is perceptive ("Blair doesn't have enough control", 20 November), he misses the point.

Isn't the issue that Tony Blair has cosied up to the Liberal Democrats ... read more

While it is true that most of the presenters on Radio 5 have a lot more hair on top of their heads than those of Radio 4 (Cristina Odone, 20 ... read more

In his essay "How to make a humane market" (20 November) Amitai Etzioni ignores one fact. The American economy is completely unsustainable.

The US is dependent for its wealth on ... read more

Of course John Prescott is right ("How to cut energy use without pain", 20 November): we can reduce consumption and combat global warming with ease. The question is, will we?

Simon Heffer spoils an otherwise informative article with the preposterous allegation that the outing of MPs is "often" done by "other homosexuals", and that "militant" campaigners are "rather pleased" with ... read more

According to Robin Oakley-Hill (Letters, 20 November), the only serious argument against religion is that, by comforting the poor, it allows the rich to mess them around - roughly the ... read more

In "The tale of an educational nonsense" (NS supplement, 13 November), Alan Smithers quotes Professor John Pratt of the Centre for Institutional Studies, who argues that the development of the ... read more

Visitors to the V&A's new Canon photographic gallery might like to carry spare jumpers with them when walking around its latest show. The first part of this, entitled Silver and ... read more

The hierarchy of metals is mystical and ancient. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia's suitors must choose one of three caskets, gold, silver or "dull lead", to win her hand. ... read more

Folk-singing has been off the popular agenda for so long that it seemed ready to go as underground as original rave culture, but recent arrivals like the young singer-violinist Eliza ... read more

In Paradise Lost Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it. Channel 4's enthralling The Real Rupert Murdoch (Saturday, 21 November, 9pm) signed up to same closed list. Charisma ... read more

The latest issue of Index on Censorship is Smashed Hits: the book of banned music. The magazine tells a tale of death, torture, censorship and the abuse of musical freedoms ... read more

Any fool can get rich by making money. It takes a genius to make his fortune by losing it. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com, runs a company which has ... read more

In the days of old, propagandists for science would make a mantra of Hume's principle that there is no relation between statements of fact and of value. But nowadays, you ... read more

When Becky Sharp, gasping from her first curry, is offered her first chilli, she thinks it will be cooling. " 'How fresh and green they look!' she said, and put ... read more

Among the Bible's most valuable lessons is the wedding guest's dictum that the good wine should not be kept until last. It is a basic principle of alcohol no self-respecting ... read more

I have been thinking about the relations between editors and newspaper proprietors, and you will know why. The owner of the New Statesman is Geoffrey Robinson, the much-troubled Paymaster-General. (The ... read more

It's very hard to predict things in football. Or in life. Or in death, come to that. Columbus died ignored and in poverty. Then he became a world-class hero. Someone ... read more

At a Washington press conference last year, a reporter asked General John M Shalikashvili, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, to "assure us that our country is effectively ... read more

It was Benjamin Franklin, a natural scientist manque if ever there was one, who observed that "in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and ... read more

When a man stops believing in God, to paraphrase Chesterton, he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes in everything - in anything. As we approach the end of the ... read more

A funny thing didn't happen to me on the way to this review. Three funny things, to be precise. I left a coin overnight on my bedside table to see ... read more

It belongs to human nature to seek and to ascribe meaning. Art makes land into landscape; history converts events into episodes; music turns noises into notes; and then there is ... read more

Half-way down Edinburgh's Royal Mile, John Knox's house looks down with dour disapproval at the lawyers, bankers and intellectuals of the medieval Auld Toon. Here, in the very cradle of ... read more

If the history of science tells us anything, it is that scientific theories will inevitably be superseded by other more successful theories, despite the wide acceptance and religious following they ... read more

No 3554 Set by George Cowley

You were asked for imaginary conversations between an (imaginary?) actress and bishop of your choice.

Report by Ms de Meaner

I knew this ... read more

Most things happen by accident. Passengers go into Stansted airport either on the special train line which comes neatly to a halt in the concrete underbelly of Norman Foster's elegant ... read more

I like to think that I have a modest reputation as a rumour-monger. If anyone tells me in absolute confidence on Tuesday morning that a senior BBC administrator has been ... read more