Published digitally and in full for the first time today, the diaries of Beatrice Webb, leading Fabian and social reformer -- as well as co-founder of the London School of Economics and New Statesman magazine -- offer a fascinating insight into British social life from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Funded by the Webb Memorial Trust and part of the LSE Digital Library, Webbs on the Web comprises 9,000 pages from Beatrice's diary manuscript (plus 8,000 transcribed pages) and covers such varying issues as the demoralised Labour party, a fierce attack on the financial institution, and the joys of clothes shopping. Surprising, then, that some of such entries were penned one hundred years ago.

Among the highlights, we read Webb on bankers after the formation of a national government following the onset of the great depression:

We know now the depth of the delusion that the financial world have, either the knowledge or goodwill to guard the safety of the country over whose pecuniary interests they preside. They first make an appalling mess of their own business - involving their country in loss of business and prestige - and then by the most bare-faced dissimulation and political intrigue they throw out one Cabinet and put in their own nominees in order to recover the cost of their miscalculation by hook or crook from the community as a whole.

Of the Irish playwright and New Statesman contributor in its early days, she writes in 1913:

We are unhappy about [George Bernard] Shaw. About five years ago I thought he was going to mellow into deeper thought and feeling, instead of which he wrote Fanny's First Play! He used to be a good colleague, genuinely interested in public affairs and a radically kind man. Now he is perverse, irate and despotic in his relations, and he is bored with all the old questions. And the quality of his thought is not good.

Leading economists, too, are at times the subject of gossip (1931):

In London we lunched with Beveridge, who heartily dislikes Keynes and regards him as a quack in economics. These two men are equally aloof from the common man: but they have little appreciation from each other - Keynes the imaginative forecaster of events a speculator in ideas - his mind flashing into the future - Beveridge bound down to the past - bureaucratic statistician, intent on keeping intact the inequality between the few who can govern and the many who must be governed - and believing in the productivity of the acquisitive instinct. The contrast is carried out in the women of their choice - the perfect artist Lopokova with her delightfully sympathetic ways, and the hard-faced administrator and intriguer Mrs. Mair - the Russian prima donna dancer and the Scottish business woman and social arrivist. Beveridge is beginning to suspect that I am a Bolshevist at heart, and therefore "out of the picture"; but he still believes in the good sense and experience of The Other One: with his comfortable slogan of the inevitability of gradualness.

And that same year following the party conference, Webb writes of Labour:

Dull, drab, disillusioned but not disunited . . .

www.newstatesman.com - Webbs on the Web

Religion for Atheists: a Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton

In the current New Statesman, John Gray acknowledges Alain de Botton's view that religion and atheism could enjoy a more positive dialogue, but says he ought to paint religion more as a broad, overarching institution than as a hinge for individual belief: "Where he could have dug deeper is the tangled relations between religion and belief. If you ask people in modern western societies whether they are religious, they tend to answer by telling you what they believe (or don't believe). When you examine religion as a universal human phenomenon, however, its connections with belief are far more tenuous."

Terry Eagleton, in the Guardian, bemoans de Botton's liberal aesthetic, conceding its benignity but questioning its social utility: "Like Comte, De Botton believes in the need for a host of 'consoling, subtle or just charming rituals' to restore a sense of community in a fractured society. He even envisages a new kind of restaurant in which strangers would be forced to sit together and open up their hearts to one another. There would be a Book of Agape on hand, which would instruct diners to speak to each other for prescribed lengths of time on prescribed topics. Quite how this will prevent looting and rioting is not entirely clear."

Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, edited by Michael Hofmann

In the Telegraph, Julian Evans wonders if Roth the neurotic may emerge from these letters more vividly than Roth the literary figure. But he acknowledges that, for Roth, only artistry gave him a coherent view of reality: "Some readers might be disappointed that Roth writes so much about his personal problems, so little about his books or the process of writing. But what is on offer here is not a suave biography: it is instead an all-inclusive picture of what it was like to be a writer who, as he said, only understood the world when he was writing - and wrote magically beautiful books when he did. Michael Hofmann's translation is superb."

David Herman, in the Jewish Chronicle, says it is precisely the savagery of Hitler's rise to power and its aftermath that affords this volume its stark resonance: "Roth died of alcoholism in 1940, his schizophrenic wife was murdered by the Nazis in 1940 and [his friend] Zweig committed suicide in 1942. But his papers were rescued in Paris and later brought to New York. Now, brilliantly put together, full of illuminating editorial material, Joseph Roth's letters give us great insight into one of the outstanding writers of the 20th century and to the terrible times he lived through".

* Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters will be reviewed in a forthcoming issue of the New Statesman.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander

In the latest New Statesman, Sophie Elmhirst is struck by Englander's capacity for deft, subtle changes of pace and theme: "He switches voice with uncanny agility, swerving from the casual, easy first-person of 'Anne Frank to 'Sister Hills', a dark, historical fable of Israeli settler history told through the lives of two women. The tonal contrast is not mere ventriloquism: Englander has the confidence and versatility to embody multiple voices, to create a complete and complex world within a story, each one distinct from the last."

Anthony Cummins, in the Telegraph, admires Englander's employment of the short story form solely on its generic terms, rather than as a nefarious through route to realising a perennial literary objective: "...short stories in their own right...gems worth polishing to perfection, rather than mere stepping stones to the traditional big game of the Great American Novel ."

www.newstatesman.com - Reviews round-up

Picture: The Artist

Actor: Jean Dujardin - The Artist

Actress: Meryl Streep - The Iron Lady

Director: Michel Hazanavicius - The Artist

Supporting actress: Octavia Spencer - The Help

Supporting actor: Christopher Plummer - Beginners

Animated film: Rango

Documentary: Senna

Outstanding British film: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Film not in the English language: The Skin I Live In

Outstanding debut: Tyrannosaur

Adapted screenplay: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan

Original screenplay: The Artist - Michel Hazanavicius

Production design: Hugo - Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo

Cinematography: The Artist - Guillaume Schiffman

Makeup and hair: The Iron Lady - Mark Coulier, J. Roy Helland, Marese Langan

Costume design: The Artist - Mark Bridges

Editing: Senna - Gregers Sall and Chris King

Sound: Hugo - Philip Stockton, Eugene Gearty, Tom Fleischman, John Midgley

Original score: The Artist - Ludovic Bource

Rising star award: Adam Deacon

Academy fellowship: Martin Scorsese

Outstanding contribution to British cinema: John Hurt

Special visual effects: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 - Tim Burke, John Richardson, Greg Butler and David Vickery

Short animation: A Morning Stroll - Grant Orchard and Sue Goffe

Short film: Pitch Black Heist - John Maclean and Geraldine O'Flynn

All photos: Getty Images

www.newstatesman.com - 2012 Baftas: in pictures

Record of the year: Adele, "Rolling In The Deep"

Album of the year: Adele, 21

Song of the year: Adele Adkins and Paul Epworth (song writer award), "Rolling In The Deep"

Best new artist: Bon Iver

Best pop solo performance: Adele, "Someone Like You"

Best rock album: Foo Fighters, Wasting Light

Best pop duo: Tony Bennett and Amy Winehouse, "Body and Soul"

Best pop vocal album: Adele, 21

Best rap album: Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Best pop instrumental album: Booker T. Jones, The Road From Memphis

Best dance record: Skrillex, Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites

Best dance/electronica album: Skrillex, Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites

Best traditional pop vocal album: - Tony Bennett & Various Artists, Duets II

Best rock performance: Foo Fighters, "Walk"

Best hard rock/metal performance: Foo Fighters, "White Limo"

Best rock song: Foo Fighters (songwriters), "Walk"

Best alternative music album: Bon Iver, Bon Iver

Best R&N performance: Corinne Bailey Rae, "Is This Love"

Best traditional R&B performance: Cee Lo Green & Melanie Fiona, "Fool for You"

Best R&B song: Cee Lo Green, Melanie Hallim, Jack Splash (songwriters), "Fool for You"

Best R&B album: Chris Brown, F.A.M.E

Best rap performance: Jay-Z & Kanye West, "Otis"

Best rap/sung collaboration: Kanye West, Rihanna, Kid Cudi & Fergie, "All of the Lights"

Best rap song: Jeff Bhasker, Stacy Ferguson, Malik Jones, Warren Trotter & Kanye West (songwriters), "All of the Lights"

Best country solo performance: Taylor Swift, "Mean"

Best country duo/group performance: The Civil Wars, "Barton Hollow"

Best country song: Taylor Swift (songwriter), "Mean"

Best country album: Lady Antebellum, Own The Night

Best new age album: Pat Metheny, What's It All About

Best improvised jazz solo: Chick Corea, "500 Miles High"

Best jazz vocal album: Terri Lyne Carrington & Various Artists, The Mosaic Project

Best jazz instrumental album: Corea, Clarke & White, Forever

Best large jazz ensemble album: Christian McBride Big Band, The Good Feeling

Best gospel/contemporary Christian music performance: Le'Andria Johnson "Jesus"

Best gospel song: Kirk Franklin (songwriter), "Hello Fear"

Best contemporary Christian music song: Laura Story (songwriter), "Blessings"

Best gospel album: Kirk Franklin, Hello Fear

Best contemporary Christian music album: Chris Tomlin, And If Our God Is for Us...

Best Latin pop, rock or urban album: Mana, Drama y Luz

Best regional Mexican or Tejano album: Pepe Aguilar, Bicentenario

Best Banda or Norteno album: Los Tigres Del Norte, Los Tigres Del Norte and Friends

Best tropical Latin album: Cachao, The Last Mambo

Best Americana album: Levon Helm, Ramble at the Ryman

Best bluegrass album: Alison Krauss & Union Station, Paper Airplane

Best blues album: Tedeschi Trucks Band, Revelator

Best folk album: The Civil Wars, Barton Hollow

Best regional roots music album: Rebirth Brass Band, Rebirth of New Orleans

Best reggae album: Stephen Marley, Revelation Pt. 1: The Root of Life

Best world music album: Tinariwen, Tassili

Best children's album: Various Artists, All About Bullies ... Big and Small

Best spoken word album: Betty White, If You Ask Me (And Of Course You Won't)

Best comedy album: Louis C.K., Hilarious

Best musical theatre album: The Book of Mormon

Best short form music video: Adele, "Rolling in the Deep"

Best long form music video: Foo Fighters, "Foo Fighters: Back and Forth"

All photos: Getty Images

www.newstatesman.com - Grammy Awards 2012: in pictures

Whitney Houston was found dead yesterday in a room at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles. She was 48. For some years before her premature death, her life had been blighted by cocaine abuse.

It's as if, writes the New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones in perhaps the most thoughtful reaction to Houston's death so far, "we've watched Whitney Houston die in front of us, slowly and unmistakably, for more than a decade". Frere-Jones goes on:

Her second album, Whitney, laid out the rough scheme she followed for the rest of her career: ballads as the crossword puzzles she would complete minutes before you, and dance numbers as her firing range. Michael Jackson represented the ecstatic and the untouchable; Whitney Houston was always human, along every axis. Her triumphs felt like things you could imagine, just barely. The peak of Whitney was "I Wanna Dance With Somebody," which forms a perfect companion to [Michael] Jackson's "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," his expression of loss of self within the joy of dance. Houston's spirit never made her seem distant, so it was plausible (the pliable listener wanted to believe) that she might dance with us, though by the time she got to the chorus she might easily be anywhere, with anyone. Her voice was good to vowels, and this time around it was "o" that won the lottery.

Here is that voice being good to the vowels in "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" (1987):

www.newstatesman.com - Whitney Houston, 1963-2012

Art

Raven Row, London E1, Asier Mendizabal, until 12 February

Mendizabal represents the symbols through which cultures are represented. He is concerned particularly with alternative and sub-cultures, often defined by subservience to those metaphors. This multi-generic exhibition fuses graphics, photography and photomontage with abstract sculpture.

Comedy

Comedy Store, London SW1, The Comedy Store Players, 12 February
The legendary comic improvs present their twice-weekly myriad of games and spontaneous surrealism. Including Paul Merton, Josie Lawrence and Lee Simpson.

Theatre

Trafalgar Studios, London SW1, Three Days in May, 13 February
Ben Brown's gripping play, directed by Alan Strachan, sees Warren Clarke as Churchill, whom, having assembled the War Cabinet, must decide whether Britain fights on or submits to Nazi Germany. A complex and nuanced political game is to be played out, with Jeremy Clyde as Lord Halifax and Robert Demeger as Chamberlain. Warren Clarke's first stage appearance in over a decade.

Dance

Old Vic Tunnels, London SE1, Without Warning, until 11 February
Quartets of musicians and dancers evoke images from Brian Keenan's memoir An Evil Cradling, an account of his period as a hostage in Beirut. An exploration of how spirit and dignity can be sustained in even the most testing circumstances.

Music

Cargo, London EC2, Twilight Sad, 14 February
The Scottish indie band celebrates the recent release of their album "No One Can Ever Know" with a gig at Cargo. Mellow and fiercely original, this promises to be an evocative performance from the experimental group.

www.newstatesman.com - The Friday Arts Diary

Despite the general tenor and tension of such challenging times, it's not often these days that the arts seem to return to first principles, to questioning their own purpose and shaping of meaning, and the ways they operate within the world and its structures of power. And yet, in a climate of seemingly permanent cuts, it's often at that primary level - where we most profoundly shape and reflect the complexities of the collective and the personal - that cultural practice can make the best case for its own continued existence and relevance.

Which is why the premiere viewing of a new documentary, The Gaza Breathing Space Film, to a capacity crowd recently at the Horse Hospital in London, was so striking. Documenting a November 2011 visit to Palestine by British-based Az Theatre director Jonathan Chadwick, it's one of the most affecting - and effective - works of committed cultural encounter to emerge for a long time.

On one level a simple video diary of a 10 day immersion in all aspects of besieged Gazan life, it's also the latest instalment in what will be a 10-year collaboration (begun in early 2009 after the Israeli assault on the strip) between Az Theatre and Gaza's Theatre for Everybody. The latter, working within extreme constraints with children traumatised by what they've faced, are finding remarkable ways to empower communities, to enhance experience and to address the great psychological pressures that generation face.

Such work within committed theatre practice isn't new of course (from Brecht to Boal and on to the Tricyle Theatre's great testimony stagings), but rarely has it been more necessary. And what's so important about both the film and the performances (made with Chadwick's long-term collaborator, Iraqi film-maker Maysoon Pachachi) is not simply that they work with quiet polemical advocacy and a subtly metaphoric eye, but that they reveal so empathetically the diverse daily registers of being in Gaza; its streets and buildings, shores and squares. Almost completely unseen beyond rapid-fire news items, the territory, with its profoundly unemployed - and predominantly young - population of 1.6 million crowded onto land no larger than the Isle of Wight, is restored to a fuller sight.

Whether it's watching children amazed that there are over 800 smuggling tunnels; learning that, in what has been described as an "open prison", there is a widespread fear of the sea; or meeting workers at Deir Al Balah Rehabilitation Centre, the viewer is gifted a glimpse, in the strongest tradition of documentary practice, of a world both recognisable and startlingly different.

In one telling voiceover comment, Chadwick worries that his carrying of a camera brands him as the "other", building an inevitable distance. However, what it does for us, of course, is to bring the moving and potent reality of Gaza that much closer, revealing the "long anger" at decades of injustice, but telling it in the enduring register of love.

"The Gaza Breathing Space Film" will be shown at SOAS, London WC1 at 7pm on 23 February www.aztheatre.org.uk

www.newstatesman.com - Gaza uncovered

In the Critics section of this week's New Statesman, our Critic at Large this week is Alastair Sooke, presenter on the BBC's The Culture Show, who discusses the new exhibition of Lucian Freud's work at the National Portrait Gallery. Though conceding that Freud's work can seem crude - "Not evervbody is enamoured with his approach - and you can understand why. Scrutinised with dead-eyed detachment, Freud's nudes are far from idealised. There is nothing flattering about them" - Sooke defends it, especially its strenuously autobiographical quality: "Ultimately ... what made him great [was the] complex, highly strung personality ... writ large in every canvas".

In Books, the NS's lead reviewer John Gray reviews Religion for Atheists: a Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton. De Botton's central argument, Gray writes, is "that religion is humanly valuable even if religious beliefs are untrue". Moreover, says Gray, de Botton show how scepticism can cohabit amicably with faith, as both seek a worldview founded on "communities, education, art and architecture and certain kinds of kindness".

In the Books Interview, Sophie Elmhirst speaks to Elliot Perlman about his new book The Street Sweeper. His third novel, it is a sweeping account of 20th-century history. At its heart is a concern with the Holocaust, and Perlman sees an inevitability in his writing on that defining atrocity of the last century: "Combine a left-leaning upbringing with a family with direct experience of the Holocaust and someone with aspirations to write and I guess, sooner or later, that person will have a stab at writing something about the Holocaust".

Also in Books: John Cornwell reviews Cullen Murphy's God's Jury: the Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World. Cornwell is as impressed with Murphy's scholarship as with his candour: "Murphy's journey through a millennium of inquisitions and torture is both beguiling and horrifying. In a mix of travel, history, interview, anecdote and acute reflection, he is immensely entertaining while being horribly specific about the mechanics of man's inhumanity to man in the name of conviction". Other reviews: Sophie Elmhirst on What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank by Nathan Englander; and Anita Sethi on Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil; William Cook on The Trials and Triumphs of Les Dawson by Louis Barfe.

Elsewhere in Critics: Ryan Gilbey on A Dangerous Method; Antonia Quirke on The Cellists That Time Forgot; Alexandra Coghlan on Der Rosenkavalier; and Thomas Calvocoressi on Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan at the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid. PLUS: Will Self's "Madness of Crowds".

www.newstatesman.com - In the Critics this week

At a very jolly ceremony at the Coach and Horses in Soho last night, Adam Mars-Jones won the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year Award, organised by the review aggregating website The Omnivore. The prize, which rewards the "author of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months", was judged by the journalists Suzi Feay, Rachel Johnson, Sam Leith and D J Taylor.

In the winning review, of Michael Cunningham's novel By Nightfall, Mars-Jones writes:

Nothing makes a novel seem more vulnerable, more naked, than an armour-plating of literary references. If you're constantly referring to landmarks, it doesn't make you look as if you're striding confidently forward - it makes you look lost. ...

The book's pages are filled with thoughts about art, or (more ominously) Thoughts about Art. Since its action occupies little more than a day, the effect is highly artificial, an avalanche of compacted insights, so that Peter can see in his wife's tired beauty in the morning light "a deep, heartbreaking humanness that's the source and the opposite of art". Even when these are golden formulas - like that one - they are leaden as moments, making the narrative degenerate into a string for wise and lovely beads. ...

Two comely young people standing in the lake shallows, "looking out at the milky haze of the horizon" - that's not an epiphany, that's a postcard.

The judges also gave an honourable mention to the runner-up, the New Statesman's lead fiction reviewer Leo Robson, for his review of Richard Bradford's biography of Martin Amis:

Martin Amis - snooker player, smoker, pithy interviewee, latter-day Napoleon of Notting Hill, sledgehammer satirist, underbelly fetishist, sporadically great novelist, victim of press intrusion and dental surgery, weepy memorialist of middle-age woes - needs a biographer who can separate the myth from the truth, who can pick through the debris of aphoristic soundbite and self-mythologising anecdote and find . . . something.

Richard Bradford considers himself the man for the job, but I doubt that anyone else will. ...

[Bradford's book] is full of repetition, contradictions and small, avoidable errors: Bradford seems to get things slightly wrong almost as a matter of principle. It is also full of spectacularly bad writing - about spectacularly good writing.

Mars-Jones was presented with an actual hatchet by Rachel Johnson and a year's supply of potted shrimp by the award's sponsor, the Fish Society.

www.newstatesman.com - Burying the hatchet

www.newstatesman.com - Charles Dickens: snapshots of a life