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9 August 1999

From the Editor…

sue-matthiasWelcome 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

Immortal longings grow again

Science has failed: it can't explain the self to the "me" generation. Hence, argues Sara Maitland, the renewed interest in an afterlife

Features

A minister's work is never done

If our rulers make bad decisions, it is often because of an exhausting and unnecessary workload. Steve Richards asks if the system can be reformed

Prescott and class: a sad confusion

Labour ministers used to exaggerate humble origins, not deny them. ByMark Hayhurst

The great Yugoslav failure

Tito's legacy seemed to offer a "third way" between Moscow and the west. But it was the worst of both worlds, and the result was Kosovo

At another eclipse, a star was born

Stephen Hawking may be popular now but, in 1919, Einstein was even more so

A corner of America that is (for a while) Europe

Gondolas, pigeons, muddy water, fine art: Venice has been exported to Las Vegas

Arts & Culture

Lunatic fringe

As Edinburgh's annual jamboree gets under way, Bill Dunn recalls his own and others' inglorious contributions to the ever-swelling comedy scene

Tiger, tiger

Art

Wim and vigour

Film

Personality problem

Classical

Nether regions

Television

Mad for it

Food

Up for the cup

Drink

Books

Put your money on Dragon Dull . . . but how much better if Dragon Dreamer could win, creating a small republic scoured of Anglo-American greed

Wales: A Question for History
Dai Smith Seren, 216pp, £12.95
ISBN 1854111256

The Welsh Illusion
Patrick Hannan Seren, 168pp, £8.95

Wales for Beginners
Jeff Fallow Writers & Readers, 170pp, £7.99

Clubbed to death

Disco Bloodbath
James St James Sceptre, 320pp, £10
ISBN 0340739533

Kind of blue

Approximately Nowhere
Michael Hofmann Faber & Faber, 77pp, £7.99
ISBN 0571195245

Hall of mirrors

Turn of the Century
Kurt Andersen Headline, 677pp, £17.99
ISBN 074727469X

Endlessly becoming

Henry James: A Life in Letters
Philip Horne (editor) Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 668pp, £25
ISBN 0713991267

Death sentences

A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Harvard University Press, 449pp, £15.50
ISBN 0674177649

Observations

Letters to the Editor

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