10 August 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
Features
Red Reads: 21-30
21-30 in our countdown of 50 books that will change your life including William Morris, Naomi Klein and Guy Debord
Red Reads: 31-40
31-40 in our countdown of 50 books that will change your life including Oscar Wilde, Joseph Heller and John Milton
A prisoner once again
At last I have made it back to Gaza to see my family, armed with supplies for my ailing mother. Now that I am here, there is no way out
Red Reads: 1-10
50 books that will change your life with recommendations from Tony Benn, Susie Orbach, Christopher Hitchens and Marina Lewycka
Red Reads: 11-20
11-20 in our countdown of 50 books that will change your life including E P Thompson, Émile Zola and John Steinbeck
Red Reads: 41-50
41-50 in our countdown of 50 books that will change your life including William Blake, Albert Einstein and Raymond Williams
Meet the ayatollahs
As Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is sworn in again as president amid further protests, Juan Cole, one of the world’s leading experts on Shia Islam, introduces the senior clerics whose conflicting views are influencing events in Iran
Essay
The death of ideas
We are at a political watershed, and are hungry for initiatives that will remake our world. But not since the 18th century, Dominic Sandbrook argues, has Britain’s intellectual cupboard been so bare
Regulars
New Statesman Leader
Our opposition to torture must be non-negotiable
A series of disturbing revelations suggests that collusion and complicity in torture may be the darkest legacy of Britain's involvement in the "war on terror".
New Statesman Leader
Trust the filly to go bonkers
Economics research is on the side of the "literally bonkers" Harriet Harman
First Thoughts
A private affair
. . . on a legal muddle, ranting historians and the wretched Rantzen
The Politics Column
All “sizzle” and no substance
There is increasing anxiety within the Obama administration over the foreign policy of Cameron, a man the US President dismissed as all "sizzle" and no substance
World Citizen
Read between the lines
The radical works which can make sense of these extraordinary times
Preparing for Power
David must goad the Guardianistas
The Guardian has played into the Tories' hands by threatening to close the Observer
Down & Out in London
Down and out in London
The real point of my local pub quiz is not to win, but for everyone to shout at each other
Culture
Counter blast
As the First World War broke out in Europe, some critics believed it would be impossible to record this mechanised mass conflict in paint. C R W Nevinson proved them wrong.
Boo, hiss, hurrah!
The theatre critic Michael Billington tells Elizabeth Kirkwood why he sees himself as a one-man “resistance movement” against consumerism
From our archive
From the NS archive: drama and democracy
In this extract from his 2007 review of Michael Billington’s book “State of the Nation”, Johann Hari examines the relationship between theatre and politics
Television
Single-Handed
Tourist-board myths about rural Ireland are exploded by this murky crime drama
Radio
Monsoons, maharanis and millionaires
In Delhi, devotees of an FM station call in to moan about the weather
Books
Muriel Spark: the Biography
Muriel Spark was a tricky woman, but her books are short and perfect. Leo Robson looks at the life and work of this most single-minded and stimulating writer
To Heaven by Water
Herzog in Hampstead
Bergsonism
The book that changed my life
Pocket Pantheon
Problems with Sartre
