14 December 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
Jesus: the Muslim prophet
Christianity is rooted in the belief that Jesus is the Son of God, so is Islam’s version of Christ a source of tension, or a way of building bridges between the world’s two largest faiths?
Features
A genocide denied
Newly uncovered Foreign Office memos show how New Labour has played politics with the massacre of the Armenians
The end of a dream
Unreality is the defining feature of the fashionable ideas of the past decade. Perhaps only a more serious crisis will overturn these delusive fancies
The hysteric moment
Novelists have increasingly faced the challenge of trying to compete with a culture that is a step ahead of them
Essay
The sperm lottery
Our tax system is inequitable, but it seems neither main party is capable of change – Labour is obsessed with redistribution and the Tories with inheritance tax. What is to be done?
Interview
The NS Interview: Shirin Ebadi
“I’m not going to give in and do as the government wants me to” - Shirin Ebadi, human rights lawyer and Nobel laureate
“Gordon is like me – he’s an axeman”
As he prepared to fly out to the Copenhagen summit, John Prescott reflected on his regrets about the Iraq war, his role as the Brown-Blair mediator, and why George W Bush is “crap”
Campaign spotlight: Pregnant Pause
Kali Mercier, 34, Amnesty International campaigner
Regulars
New Statesman Leader
Leader: Our craven calculations in Iraq must not infect Afghanistan
The Iraq war was a ruinous mistake. The lessons from it have not yet been learned.
First Thoughts
Deniers, bankers and royal snappers
Climate change deniers should reveal whether they hold lucrative 'catastrophe' bonds
The Politics Column
Camp Cameron and the progressives
The extraordinary reaction to Speaker Bercow and his wife shows that Cameron and his allies only really like modernisers on their own terms
World Citizen
Iraq: the crime of the century
The purpose of the Chilcot inquiry is to normalise an epic crime by providing enough of a theatre of guilt to satisfy the media
Down & Out in London
This isn’t just wine flu
Illness leaves me incapable of doing much more than lying in bed all day reading books. Plus ça change..
Culture
Film
Changing the garde
A new breed of star showed us that big-name actors could be experimental too
Books
Top 10: books of the decade
Chosen by New Statesman staff
