26 August 2002
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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
Kill the licence fee
The BBC is financed by a poll tax which turns the poor into criminals and stultifies the intellectual and creative life of the nation. We should get rid of it, argues David Cox
Features
You can be green and still love the poor
There's no longer any need to choose between men and monkeys. Both can be saved - or so the campaigning groups say. Will the Johannesburg summit deliver?
Essay
NS Essay - How the British invented Hinduism
By "reviving" the Hindu religion, the middle classes of India hope to turn their country into a world power. Yet before the 19th century, no such religion existed
Regulars
Cristina Odone on grief for Holly and Jessica
Why do the chatterers try to make us feel ashamed of showing grief and sympathy?
Darcus Howe sees a damp squib in Brixton
On a sunny weekend, a race relations adviser fails to disturb the drug dealers
Competition
Win vouchers to spend at any Tesco store
Culture
Magnum bogus
Why is the Foreign Office sponsoring an exhibition of photographs depicting eastern Europe? Richard Gott discovers that old-fashioned agitprop is alive and well
Opera - Under big skies
Peter Conrad discovers Glyndebourne without grass in the New Mexico desert
Art - All-night arty
Alex Gibbons enjoys a sleepover with Matisse and Picasso
Theatre
Theatre - Continental drift
Katherine Duncan-Jones on how Tom Stoppard's study of philosophy and revolution slips its moorings
Film
Film - Holmes, sweet Holmes
William Cook watches a once talented director feed off his own corpse
Television
Television - Return to sender
Zoe Williams isn't gripped by a melodramatic documentary about the anthrax "epidemic"
Books
America - Andrew Stephen finds the latest American craze
Book clubs have become the latest way to prove your intellectual superiority. You choose a highbrow book - and then you buy the crib notes on it so people think you actually read it
Farewell to the virgin in the garden. A S Byatt has redefined the novel of ideas. D J Taylor on the culmination of a great fictional sequence that maps English intellectual life from the 1950s to the present day
A Whistling Woman A S Byatt Chatto & Windus, 422pp, £16.99 ISBN 0701173807
Seminal ideas
Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation Olivia Judson Chatto & Windus, 320pp, £16.99 ISBN 0701169257
Repeat to fade. Stephen Pollard on Tom Nairn's latest sour whinge
Pariah: misfortunes of the British kingdom Tom Nairn Verso, 170pp, £13 ISBN 1859846572
The great Satan
The Eagle's Shadow: why America fascinates and infuriates the world Mark Hertsgaard Bloomsbury, 219pp, £12.99 ISBN 0747560536
Dreams of leaving
The Looked After Kid: memoirs from a children's home Paolo Hewitt Mainstream Publishing, 208pp, £9.99 ISBN 1840185821
Back in print
Rogue Male Geoffrey Household Orion Books, 182pp, £6.99 ISBN 075285139X
Written-down talk
The Universal Home Doctor Simon Armitage Faber and Faber, 66pp, £12.99 ISBN 0571215335 Feminine Gospels Carol Ann Duffy Picador, 70pp, £12.99
Sport - Jason Cowley spots a football dealmaker
Behind every successful footballer lies a good dealmaker
