16 March 2009
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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
1989 The year of the crowd
New Statesman editor Jason Cowley introduces a special issue on the year that saw the Berlin Wall come down
Features
Missing you already
Pakistan is at war with itself, with blackouts, corruption and terror attacks. Now there are calls for the return of the reviled Musharraf
Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral
The funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini was not a tragedy, writes James Buchan, but a gruesome farce: idolatrous, makeshift, deadly and utterly lacking in self-control
Trial by firing squad
“This was revolution in the usual style, with barricades and bloodshed.” Paul Davies recalls the Christmas he spent dodging bullets as the despised Ceausescu regime collapsed. Part of a New Statesman special on the Year of the Crowd
Hillsborough
Andrew Hussey recalls the tragedy that changed football and made it seem as if an obscure curse was being visited on the people of Liverpool. Part of a New Statesman special on the Year of the Crowd
Tiananmen Square
Many Chinese no longer wish to remember the day when Communist tanks burst in to Tiananmen Square and thousands of democracy campaigners were killed. But, says the award-winning novelist Yiyun Li, to ignore the events of 4 June is to turn away from the truths and lessons of history
A marketplace of outrage
British Muslims took to the streets and burned copies of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Here was an expression of Islamic fury and a portent of a new kind of conflict.
Berlin
The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was the culmination of months of protest across communist Europe and another triumph for the power and pressure of crowds
Regulars
The Politics Column
No nation broker
Gordon Brown hopes the G20 summit in London will restore his and Labour’s fortunes. He should be so lucky, writes Peter Riddell
The Politics Column
Back on the terror trail
The republican killers of three security service men in Northern Ireland represent nothing but their own bigotry, writes Leo McKinstry
First Thoughts
The ego has landed
. . . on sectarianism, social ills, selection, sports appeals and self-regard
Down & Out in London
Waiting for nothing
Living like a student again, our columnist discovers the pleasures of Corrie and why you should never tell a woman she’s overweight
World Citizen
No fault, no debate
The longer the Prime Minister remains silent about the mistakes of the past, the less convincing he is as a leader for the present, let alone the future
Culture
War through women’s eyes
Female artists have charted wars throughout the 20th century, both at home and abroad, and found unorthodox beauty in unlikely surroundings
All the world’s a stage
Brian Logan meets Lisa Goldman, who is bringing an eclectic international vision to the Soho Theatre in London
Performance
Blinded by the light
The drama of John Adams’s nuclear opera is lost in theorems Doctor Atomic London Coliseum, WC2
Film
Australia’s underbelly
Fond memories of the lurid world of “Ozploitation” cinema Not Quite Hollywood (18) dir: Mark Hartley
Television
Too much of a good thing
A Gavin and Stacey spin-off is long on fat jokes but short on belly laughs Horne and Corden BBC3
Travels
Visiting the Zapatistas
Fifteen years after declaring war, the Mexican rebels are inviting tourists into their territory
Books
The fiction ghetto
Observations on bookshops
High art lite
Kenneth Clark’s 1969 series Civilisation was a landmark in television, and it continues to influence programme makers to this day – for the worse
With Hitler and his pals
The Kindly Ones Jonathan Littell, translated by Charlotte Mandell Chatto & Windus, 992pp, £20
