01 September 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
Coming soon: the new poor
You have heard of the third-world debt crisis: now for the one in the first world. Ordinary people, up to their necks in debt, will bear the brunt while the rich get off scot-free
Features
Stay cool, and heat up the planet
The answer to this summer's heatwave? Air-conditioning - a way of life in the US, but rare in France and Britain. The trouble is, it is likely to make global warming even worse. Dan Rosenheck reports
Everybody has got it wrong about my country
Even the left, which invested too much ideological hope in South Africa, sees it as a land of crime and instability, writes Liz McGregor
The citizens of nowhere
A global middle class - rootless, urban, technocratic, materialistic - is emerging. It exists in every nation but feels attached to none. Paul Kingsnorth doesn't like the look of it
Regulars
The Politics Column
Politics - Anne Perkins on the Blairification of the civil service
The Banquo at the Hutton inquiry is Sir Andrew Turnbull, cabinet secretary. He should be protecting the independence of his officials. But is he just keeping his head down?
Darcus Howe finds nothing at carnival to lift his spirits
More than two centuries after the liberation of slaves, we sink into despair and stupidity
Competition
Win vouchers to spend at any Tesco store
Culture
Silent witness
Since the 1930s, documentary film-making has been a powerful platform for political activists. But you won't have seen these films at the cinema. Lilian Pizzichini traces the history of alternative newsreels
Dead ringers
Film retrospective - Philip Kerr on Charlie Chaplin and his shadow self - Adolf Hitler
Impressions of despair
Art - Richard Cork discovers a darker Monet in the painter's long lament for his wife
Anything goes
Jazz - Richard Cook welcomes a crop of hot young singers who are stealing the show
Television
The great unwatched
Television - Charlotte Raven discovers there's more to BBC4 than opera classes and classic novels
Books
Post-ironically, I failed
Observations on words
The root of all evil. Robert Mugabe may be a bad man but, in the list of recent human rights abusers in Africa, it is absurd to put him in the top league. And like all pin-up Mr Evils, he is the product of political processes. By Richard Dowden
Brothers Under the Skin: travels in tyranny Christopher Hope Macmillan, 280pp, £17.99 ISBN 1405005556
Mad Cal
The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter Faber & Faber, 1,260pp, £40 ISBN 0571163408
A fine Trollopel
Fanny: a fiction Edmund White Chatto & Windus, 328pp, £16.99 ISBN 0701169710
The third sex
The Storyteller's Daughter: return to a lost homeland Saira Shah Michael Joseph, 320pp, £16.99 ISBN 0718145623 The Bookseller of Kabul Asne Seierstad Little, Brown, 245pp, £12.99
The long trial
Kafka's Last Love: the mystery of Dora Diamant Kathi Diamant Secker & Warburg, 402pp, £16.99 ISBN 0436209950
Midnight's children
Trespassing Uzma Aslam Khan Flamingo, 464pp, £15.99 ISBN 0007171838
