23 August 2004
Become a subscriber and save £££
Subscribe to the New Statesman for just £82 and receive a free copy of Roy Hattersley’s In Search of England(Hardcover)
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
The warlords of America
Most of the US's recent wars were launched by Democratic presidents. Why expect better of Kerry? The debate between US liberals and conservatives is a fake; Bush may be the lesser evil. From John Pilger in Washington
Features
Somewhere over the rainbow
Since apartheid ended, hardly any land has been transferred to black South Africans, yet old liberation heroes prosper. Will SA go Zimbabwe's way?
It's not poisson, it's poison!
Fish, once thought the healthiest of foods, is now bad for us. Pollution is everywhere, and there is no longer any such thing as nature
What Bevan would think of Blair
The founder of the NHS would regard Labour's reforms as unspeakably evil, argues Clare Beckett
Sex at the click of a mouse
Tim Fountain celebrates the internet's greatest benefit to mankind: you can live out your fantasies, pronto
Regulars
The Politics Column
Politics - John Kampfner dissects the European Commission
With a new European Commission president who is keen to show he is no one's poodle, can Tony Blair still secure an advantageous deal for Britain in Brussels?
Darcus Howe hails Andrew Flintoff, cricket genius
Flintoff rises above "the welfare state of mind" that bedevilled English cricket
Competition
Win vouchers to spend at any Tesco store
Culture
We can be heroes
George Orwell was troubled by the way in which boys' weeklies evaded the problems of contemporary society, seeing it as a form of covert political control. But we didn't read comics for realism, writes Jason Cowley. We read them to be inspired
Lost in space
Art 1 - Richard Cork is kept guessing by an artist who thrives on ambiguity
Poetic works
Art 2 - Matthew Sturgis hopes a new show will reinstate Milton in the national consciousness
Double trouble
Opera - Peter Conrad on a Russian nihilist and an Italian cynic played back to back
Film
Mark Kermode - Beasts in the night
Film - At last - a fantasy that engages the mind as well as the heart. By Mark Kermode The Village (12A)
Television
Andrew Billen - Identity crisis
Television - A ruthless examination of the truth behind a stereotype. By Andrew Billen The Trouble With Black Men (BBC3)
Books
Mum's the word. The world has many mothers but little sense of what it might be to become one, thanks to a dearth of serious writing on the subject. Rachel Cusk on a sphere of female silence and servitude
Making Babies: stumbling into motherhood Anne Enright Jonathan Cape, 196pp, £10.99 ISBN 022406293X
Hell on earth
The Boys' Crusade: American GIs in Europe Paul Fussell Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 184pp, £9.99 ISBN 0297646931
The great divide
The Likes of Us: a biography of the white working class Michael Collins Granta, 274pp, £12 ISBN 1862076006
Little things in life
Sum Total Ray Gosling Pomona, 224pp, £9.99 ISBN 1904590055
Man of two halves
The Secret Purposes David Baddiel Little, Brown, 416pp, £16.99 ISBN 0316725765
My holiday read
For an Englishman abroad, it's good to read that the empire wasn't all bad
