03 February 2003
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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
Terrorism: the price we pay for poverty
A cabinet minister says it at last: if we truly want security, we must do far more to end misery and frustration in the developing world. Patricia Hewitt interviewed by John Kampfner, our political editor
Features
Perverse rage of the oppressed
Claire Messud on the lessons of Algeria, home to many of those recently arrested as suspected terrorists, and a country where the passion and ruthlessness of al-Qaeda was foreshadowed 50 years ago
Pay any price, bear any burden?
Idealism and vision have returned to America. Why, ask some, should the Arab world, with a US-led drive for reconstruction, not turn out as eastern Europe did?
The new feudalism
Personal service to the professional classes - from dog-walkers through caterers to lifestyle managers - is the fastest growing area of the labour market, creating a new, customised domestic proletariat. But this wasn't supposed to happen
We've forgotten how to oppose
Ministers haven't sold out; their old activist friends, who keep their mouths shut, have
The Eichmanns who rule our lives
Whether we are doctors or single parents, we are all victims of petty bureaucrats
Platform
Chekhov attended to reality, not to "issues". We should remember that today when we ponder a little girl's death in east London. The first in a series of occasional columns
Regulars
The Politics Column
Politics - John Kampfner charts Blair's loss of status in Europe
The first British leader in a generation to command true influence in Europe has squandered it by playing lapdog to George Bush
John Pilger accuses the Observer of a great betrayal
In its leaders supporting the war in Iraq, the Observer proves that it has truly buried its great liberal editor David Astor, and his principled, "freethinking" legacy
Cristina Odone admits she's a moneyphobe
Sweaty palms, dizziness, shallow breath: don't panic, you've just got moneyphobia
Darcus Howe fears that war will claim his nephew
Not one member of the government stands to lose a son in this war. My brother does
Competition
Win vouchers to spend at any Tesco store
Culture
Oriental Lolitas
While paedophilia causes growing hysteria in the west, the Japanese, even in public, read comic books featuring schoolgirls in pornographic poses. Does it make any difference that it's just ink and paper?
The Cossack Chopin
Prokofiev lived and composed in Stalinist Russia for 20 years, saw his wife hustled off to a labour camp, and died on the same day as the dictator in 1953. Peter Conrad finds both civic duty and subterfuge in his music
Bare beauty
Art - Ned Denny admires the loneliness and silence of de Chirico's most solitary figure
Chalked up
Technology - Kathryn Corrick on how the internet has returned public art to the streets
Film
A land of lost content
Film - Philip Kerr enjoys Steven Spielberg's re-creation of a more innocent America
Theatre
An insubstantial pageant
Theatre - Amy Rosenthal finds more artifice than magic in the latest production of The Tempest
Television
Adding a Liddle humour
Television - Andrew Billen on how the BBC's funny man made a better case for war than Blair
Books
The emptiness of a secular creed. The editor of the Economist, in his indifference to the human costs of an ideology, is like the western apologists for the old Soviet Union, argues John Gray
20:21 Vision: the lessons of the 20th century for the 21st Bill Emmott Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 327pp, £20 ISBN 071399519X
The chosen ones
China's New Rulers: the secret files Edited by Andrew J Nathan and Bruce Gilley Granta Books, 256pp, £14.99 ISBN 1590170466
A badly costed war
The Battle of Normandy 1944 Robin Neillands Cassell, 425pp, £20 ISBN 0304358371
Second-novel syndrome
One Day Ardashir Vakil Hamish Hamilton, 292pp, £12.99 ISBN 024114132X
The others
Edward Said: criticism and society Abdirahman A Hussein Verso, 339pp, £19 ISBN 185984670X
Novel of the week
Dot in the Universe Lucy Ellmann Bloomsbury, 199pp, £12.99 ISBN 0747562547
