26 April 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
The great Balkan lie
The government's concern for human rights is bogus, argues Nick Cohen
Features
A war to make us all grow up
Kosovo gives Europe a chance to escape from the American shadow, while Russia can once more play a serious international role, argues John Lloyd
Kosovo's fighters will do it their way
Hugh Barnes, behind Serb lines with the KLA, finds that the fiercely determined soldiers think western betrayal is ultimately inevitable
The real Chris Woodhead scandal
Francis Beckett blows the whistle on the chief inspector: not for his sex life, but for the damage he does to any hopes of higher school standards
Bleak House lives on
New legal rules are supposed to make civil justice quicker. But Richard Colbey fears that we have not seen the last of dilatory lawyers and pompous judges
The oldest profession turns kosher
In his visit to a Dutch brothel, Derek Draper missed the real story, reports Saskia Sissons
Everything is so very new
New York, London, Paris. . . soon you can add Berlin to the great cities you want to live in. Germany, argues David Lawday, can finally bury its past
Culture
Playing the game I
New films by David Cronenberg and Chris Marker share a fascination with computer games and their metaphors. Ziauddin Sardar plugs in to eXistenZ
Playing the game II
New films by David Cronenberg and Chris Marker share a fascination with computer games and their metaphors. Jonathan Romney plugs in to Level 5
Other voices . . .
Music 1 byRichard Cook
. . . And other choices
Music 2 byDavid Thompson
Books
A dictator's apprenticeship. The Vienna through which Hitler wandered in his youth was a melting pot of decadent turmoil, the capital of an empire in decline - a "research laboratory for world destruction"
Hitler's Vienna Brigitte Hamann OUP, 482pp, £20
Godot or Grace?
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 1999 Matthew Engel (editor) John Wisden & Co Ltd, 1,520pp, £28
Knowing too much
Into the Looking-Glass Wood Alberto Manguel Bloomsbury, 273pp, £20
Heads off
Sixty Poems Ian Hamilton Faber & Faber, 80pp, £7.99 Poems: New and Collected 1957-97 Wislawa Szymborska Faber & Faber, 320pp, £14.99
Sans everything
Time of our Lives Tom Kirkwood Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 277pp, £20
Novel of the week
Underground Tobias Hill Faber & Faber, 248pp, £9.99
Commentary - Footloose in La-La land
Great bookshops and galleries, sunshine and starlets - George Waldenlolls in LA
