19 February 1999
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From the Editor…
Welcome to the New Statesman website. Whether you are a new reader or an existing one - online or via the magazine - I hope you'll enjoy the great writing, fresh ideas and provocative debate that make the New Statesman Britain's award-winning current affairs weekly
Cover story
We are richer than you think
Peter Kellner finds serious faults in the official figures for the British economy but warns that, if they are revised, the poor (as usual) will be the losers
Features
We must end the "walk on by" society
Would you step in if you saw a child vandalising a phone box? Jack Straw thinks you should
Why we don't need GM foods
The biotechnology industry claims it can feed the world. But that can easily be done anyway - provided we don't leave it all to the free market
Learning English? Get a tracksuit
For Brenda Maddox, trying to lose her American accent was a total body experience
Goodbye to a marvellous racket
Stephen Bates welcomes the end of duty-free and sees in it a rare victory for social justice over the power of corporate lobbying
The NS special report - What the BBC did not tell us
Richard Webster finds flaws in a "shock" broadcast on child abuse in Wales
New Labour is just child's play
The government suffers from the insecurity of being in its infancy, arguesBrian Brivati
Prescott kicks butt on transport
The Deputy PM is furious at the rail companies' performance. But if he wants real improvement, advises Christian Wolmar, he must think long term
Arts & Culture
Sketches of pain
Real painters, Francis Bacon insisted, don't doodle. But he was fibbing. Charles Darwent looks at the intriguing truth
At home abroad
Jazz byRichard Cook
Mr Schrader's feeling for snow
Film byJonathan Romney
Cracking form
Architecture byHugh Aldersey-Williams
Bach pages
Classical byDermot Clinch
Books
Flight from the imagination. Was Rudyard Kipling a modernist experimentalist or an imperialist windbag, a producer of populist rhetoric? And why does a faint sense of unease still cloud his name?
The Unforgiving Minute: a life of Rudyard Kipling
Harry Ricketts Chatto & Windus, 434pp, £25
Thatcher's friend
Essays, Moral, Political and Economic
Samuel Brittan The David Hume Institute: Hume Papers on Public Policy, Vol 6 No 4, Edinburgh University Press, 113pp, £9.95
The pale avenger
The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis
Thomas Dormandy The Hambledon Press, 433pp, £25
Fuzzy logic
Trapped in the Net: the unanticipated consequences of computerisation
Gene I Rochlin Princeton University Press, 293pp, £13.95
WiredLife: who are we in the digital age?
Charles Jonscher Bantam Press, 293pp, £14.99
Novel of the week
Single & Single
John le Carre Hodder & Stoughton, 352pp, £16.99
Observations
Letters to the Editor
New Statesman readers give their views - see what they said and find out how to contribute yourself by going to our letters pages
