17 January 2000
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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 plot to keep us puffing
Nick Cohen reveals the secret plans of the tobacco giants to continue their long fight against attempts to convince us that their product is a killer
Features
It's not the flu that ails our NHS
If there's a shortage of hospital beds, that's exactly how health service managers have planned it
What the Dome could have been like
An actress dreamed of a Fun Palace. But do we really want artistic dreams?
Home is where my profit is made
Since the Tories, we have regarded buying our own homes as a great investment and a citizen's duty. Maybe we're wrong, writes John-Paul Flintoff
Why Tony Blair is the greatest
Anthony Bevins defies the cynics to argue that, though he is indeed a control freak, the present British PM is the most intelligent of the postwar era
Only westerners can afford to be ill
Pharmaceutical companies want to keep exclusive patents that force the price of medicines beyond the reach of the third world poor, reports Isabel Hilton
They stayed too long at the top
The scandal engulfing Helmut Kohl proves that leaders should serve for shorter terms
Stand by for the super new cities
John Prescott may soon approve the biggest building boom in history
The Marcos cronies are back on top
The Philippines poor thought they had a friend for president. Wrong, finds John Elliott
Working flat out for £20 and a Kit Kat
Low pay, no security, backbreaking schedules: Geoffrey Beattie experiences the casualisation of labour
The murder of our biggest industry
New Statesman Scotland
Let's peeble the judges again
New Statesman Scotland - Political and judicial appointments are too closely entangled for everyone's good, argues George Rosie
We need an architectural revolution
New Statesman Scotland - Unless we wake up, we are condemning ourselves to live in antiquated, ugly, unsustainable towns and cities. Look south, argues Anna Paterson
This Alba
New Statesman Scotland
Primary Tartan
New Statesman Scotland
Grassroots
New Statesman Scotland
Regulars
Arts & Culture
Lunching for literature
Not for the first time in his life, Craig Raine is on the Magazine Diet. You launch a literary review and lose pounds
Dial demons
Music 1 - Richard Cook on the producers who call the tune
Fellatio (ma non troppo)
Music 2 - Dermot Clinch on the composer hailed as a saviour of the art
Shell shocked
Design - Hugh Aldersey-Williams on a perverse package
Television
Howe's England
Television - Andrew Billen on the tribal conundrums of race, class and nation
Drink
Abstinence, but not yet drink
Drink - Victoria Moore is saved from temperance by a medicinal Spanish red
Books
Eyes wide shut. Edward Skidelsky reads Freud's great work 100 years after its first publication, and finds himself wandering through the sleazy back alleys of the Victorian mind
The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud (translated by Joyce Crick) Oxford University Press, 458pp, £20
ISBN 0192100491
Time travel
Railways and the Victorian Imagination
Michael Freeman Yale University Press, 272pp, £25
ISBN 0300079702
Hating the Irish
The Last Days of Dublin Castle: the diaries of Mark Sturgis
Michael Hopkinson (editor) Irish Academic Press, 278pp, £27.50
ISBN 0716526263
Killer elite
Imperial Warriors: Britain and the Gurkhas
Tony Gould Granta, 480pp, £20
ISBN 1862072841
Black and white
Big Men, Little People: encounters in Africa
Alec Russell Macmillan, 306pp, £16.99
ISBN 0333753593
Harem politics
What the Body Remembers
Shauna Singh Baldwin Doubleday, 320pp, £12.99
ISBN 0385600437
Selling space
Carl Sagan: a life
Keay Davidson John Wiley, 540pp, £19.50
ISBN 0471252867
Carl Sagan: A life in the Cosmos
William Poundstone Henry Holt, 473pp, £20
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
