12 November 2001

From the Editor…

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Features

"Hello, world, I'm George Bush"

US foreign policy, open and pragmatic, is now the polar opposite of what it was two months ago

How a free press censors itself

Ignored, threatened with the sack, attacked in print, American journalists who dissent from the war effort risk becoming hated outcasts, reports Scott Lucas

No fighting today: it's raining

Tim Lambon finds that the war in Afghanistan is not quite as the reporters portray it

The whole world in their hands

Social democrats must get their act together; the anti-globalisers have stolen a march on them

The right questions, but the wrong answers

Peter Hain and Dick Benschop on the anti-globalisation movement

Bring back the intellectuals

Once upon a time, special advisers didn't try to square the press: they were experts, often academics, who actually offered advice

Hopes of immortality

Blair's doing it, Kennedy's doing it, even the middle classes are doing it: sitting for portraits is fashionable once more, reports John-Paul Flintoff

In a land of political pygmies

Scotland's First Minister has the police on his tail. But he's still in charge. Why? Tom Brownreports

Essay

The New Statesman Essay - The Empire strikes back

Is a new, more cuddly version of imperialism the answer for "failed states" such as war-torn Afghanistan? Look closely at the historical record and you have to doubt it, argues Maria Misra

Culture

The great lost cause

For Hemingway and his friends, the Spanish civil war was the happiest time of their lives. But, as Raymond Carr writes, it was this conflict that darkened the horizon of the 20th century

Master of diversity

Arts profile - Paul Bonaventura talks to a prodigious writer who changed our way of seeing

Animal magic

Art - Ned Denny is spellbound by the visionary work of the most sophisticated Renaissance chronicler

Collector's fair

Opera - Michael White surveys the stall set out by Ireland's pre-eminent music festival

Optical illusion

Film - Philip Kerr on why you don't need special effects when you've got Nicole Kidman

The wittiest man on TV

Television - Andrew Billen thinks we should see even more of Jonathan Ross

Books

Pilgrim's progress

Innocent in the House Andy McSmith Verso, 311pp, £13 ISBN 1859846432

Founding father

Kinnock: the biography Martin Westlake Little, Brown, 768pp, £25 ISBN 0316848719

The Pickwickian PM. Richard Gott is amused by an international pariah and provocateur, and by a lightweight historian with flair

Churchill's War: triumph and adversity David Irving Focal Point Publications, 1,051pp, £25 ISBN 1872197159 Churchill Roy Jenkins Macmillan, 1,002pp, £30

Dishonourable member

Image in the Water Douglas Hurd Little, Brown, 243pp, £16.99 ISBN 0316857726

Paperback reader

On Histories and Stories A S Byatt Vintage, 196pp, £7.99 ISBN 0099283832

Suffragette city

The Pankhursts Martin Pugh Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 608pp, £20 ISBN 0713994398

Conservative pessimism

Unfinest Hour: Britain and the destruction of Bosnia Brendan Simms Penguin, 462pp, £18.99 ISBN 0713994258

Fidel Castro

The last revolutionary

The last revolutionary

Steve Richards

On Tory policy

Our future in their hands

Science

Religion and Darwin

Since the dawn  of time

James Macintyre

Miliband's dilemma

Brussels is back with a vengeance

Will Self

On Oscar Wilde

Where the Wilde things are

Film review

Bright Star

Bright Star (PG)

Books

Paul Auster

Invisible

Interview

Alain de Botton

The Books Interview: Alain de Botton

Vote!

Was the government wrong to sack David Nutt?

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