14 July 2008
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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
‘‘I’ll leave when I finish the job’’
In his most revealing interview yet, Gordon Brown talks exclusively to the New Statesman about his political fortunes, press criticism, Heathcliff - and why he won't resign
Features
How Britain wages war
The military has created a wall of silence around its frequent resort to barbaric practices, including torture, and goes out of its way to avoid legal scrutiny
Turning right together
In the final stages of most battles for the presidency, the Republican candidate drifts to the left while the Democrat heads right. This year, McCain and Obama are fighting over the same conservative ground
Regulars
New Statesman Leader
It's time for Gordon Brown to start trusting the voters
Rather than lauding the settlement on poverty, the PM should have been calling on G8 leaders to honour their promises
The Politics Column
A sea change on immigration?
On public service reform, the government is at last beginning to listen to front-line staff, rather than Whitehall mandarins
Parent power confronts Sarkozy
No French government has dared challenge a popular protest by millions of French people, especially when they take to the streets. Now they're taking to the schools...
The Man Who . . . No 4035
H M Bateman was noted for his "The Man Who . . ." cartoons, such as "The Man Who Lit His Cigar Before the Royal Toast" and "The Boy Who Breathed on the Glass in the British Museum", featuring comically exaggerated reactions to minor social gaffes. We asked you for things that could feature in a Bateman-style cartoon today - for example, "The Man Who Played Decent Music on His Car Stereo While Waiting For the Traffic Lights to Change"
Culture
Sing out sisters
Muslim rap is developing a large following in the US and UK, yet female artists trying to break into the scene are often intimidated, or even threatened
Family matters
When Roger Wright became the Proms' new director, debate raged even in his own household about whether he should tamper with the Last Night
Two worlds collide
The king of bling Jay-Z was a strange choice to headline a hippie festival, but perhaps both he and his audience came away a little wiser
Performance
Boys from the black stuff
What lies beneath the regimented identity of these Scottish soldiers? Black Watch Barbican Theatre, London EC2
Film
Money, money, money
Plot and dialogue are incidental to this cash-in on Abba's back catalogue Mamma Mia! (PG) dir: Phyllida Lloyd
Television
The call of the weird
Knights Templar, comedy accents and giant snails? It must be silly season Bonekickers BBC1 Lab Rats BBC2
Radio
Let's hear it for the soul sister
The philosophical debate was all Greek to me, until Mary Warnock popped up
Books
Ancient and modern
In the 1920s O G S Crawford invented aerial archaeology, one of many services this eccentric Marxist misanthrope performed for the study of antiquity. Jonathan Meades on a man who loved the past and hated his contemporaries
Father of invention
On Some Faraway Beach: the Life and Times of Brian Eno David Sheppard Orion Books, 480pp, £20
The doomed dynasty
Ekaterinburg: the Last Days of the Romanovs Helen Rappaport Hutchinson, 272pp, £18.99
Observations
Doing the splits
Like Mr Rochester's first wife, the misogyny and homophobia of the Church of England's factions keep leaping out of the attic to scare off decent folk
Southern discomfort
Few of the swells barrelling down the A303 in Porsche 4x4s to wealthy enclaves such as Rock or Fowey will realise the poverty in Cornwall
Part of the family
Under communist rule, most of those Jews who had survived the holocaust to return to Poland were expelled...
The village Olympics
Archer Alison Williamson, who will take part in her fifth Olympics at Beijing, took bronze in Athens four years ago. But she won her first medal aged 10 - a silver from the 1981 Wenlock Olympian Games
