09 April 2001
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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
Features
Duel for the Tube
John Kampfner reveals the bitter personal enmities behind the battle over London's Underground
An old sow eats its own farrow
On his Herefordshire farm, Jeremy Bugler finds little comfort, but sees hope in Sweden
Pursued by a man with a mission
Geoffrey Robinson reveals how he twice met his biographer Tom Bower
And now for the really stupid party
The Tories once seemed to have a monopoly on all the ideas. Today, they have only two - and one has William Hague running scared
The civil war is hereby extended
To the Tories, a delayed election just means more time for internal fighting
The Serbs chose their own butcher
Slobodan Milosevic is now portrayed as an evil foisted upon a defenceless people. Melanie McDonagh reminds us that he repeatedly won elections
The quangos just grow and grow
Despite the promise of a people's government, the country is increasingly run by unaccountable, secretive crony networks
Tea and tears with an unfunny man
He is a brilliant comic on page and screen, but face to face Clive James reveals himself to be an unhappy man, terrified of the price of celebrity. By Johann Hari
Essay
The New Statesman Essay - Nationalism? What's that?
John Bull had only a brief life. Wordsworth and Jane Austen didn't know him; Suez killed him off. Hague's bid to revive him is doomed
Culture
Action man
Known to thousands as "Le Maitre", Charles Maurras was an intellectual giant of the French canon. A formidable journalist and polemicist, he was also a man of violent words, a philosopher of fascism
Stan the man
Art - Tom Rosenthal on Stanley Spencer's potent mix of sex and religion
Film
Bob the bum
Film - Philip Kerr discovers that Robert De Niro is following the money, and not good scripts
Television
The God slot
Television - BBC1's new series is flash and filmic, but is it truthful, wonders Andrew Billen
Books
Oh no, not another silly title. The great quest of British publishing is profundity by association, the search for books that can convince middlebrow readers that they are reading something highbrow. By Will Self
Wittgenstein's Poker: the story of a ten-minute argument between two great philosophers David Edmonds and John Eidinow Faber and Faber, 267pp, £9.99 ISBN 057120547X
Here's to you, Mr R
The Paymaster: Geoffrey Robinson, Maxwell and new Labour Tom Bower Simon & Schuster, 272pp, £17.99 ISBN 0743206894
Feminist icon
Hellish Nell: last of Britain's witches Malcolm Gaskill Fourth Estate, 402pp, £15.99 ISBN 1841151092
A mediocre goddess. Indira Gandhi left behind a lonely and unremarkable adolescence to become India's only female prime minister, drawing support from the poor and dispossessed. But she was also a despot, writes Pankaj Mishra, who brought shame, violence and misery to her nation
Indira: a life of Indira Nehru Gandhi Katherine Frank HarperCollins, 578pp, £19.99 ISBN 0002556464
Novel of the week
The Bone Hunter Tom Holland Little, Brown, 352pp, £10.99 ISBN 0316648191
No More Bother To Him
Poem - In memoriam Paul O'Flinn 14/3/2001
Wedding bells and blues
A History of the Wife Marilyn Yalom Rivers Oram Press/Pandora, 408pp, £20 ISBN 0863584268
