In the Critics section of this week’s New Statesman [1], Terry Eagleton reviews Our Church, Roger Scruton’s personal history of the Church of England. “Scruton is homesick for the medieval England of Piers Plowman,” Eagleton writes. “He seems not to know that it was . . . a place of filth, fanaticism and excruciating torture.” Eagleton argues that Scruton has succumbed to his Romantic prejudices. “One suspects that this maverick intellectual is as fervent as he is about belonging because he will never really be able to.”

In the Books interview, Jonathan Derbyshire talks to Anne Applebaum about her new book about eastern Europe after the Second World War, Iron Curtain. “There’s a very real sense,” she says, “in which Soviet totalitarianism contained the seeds of its own destruction.”

Also in Books: William Cook on an edition of Mary Whitehouse’s letters of complaint to broadcasters in the 1960s and 1970s; Emma Hogan reviews John Batchelor’s biography of Alfred Tennyson; Anita Sethi on Ali Smith’s essay collection Artful; philosopher Simon Blackburn reviews Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel, and finds Nagel giving succour to creationists and fans of intelligent design; the BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin on The Carbon Crunch by Dieter Helm; and Toby Litt on Julian Cope’s Copendium.

Our Critic at large this week is Kate Mossman, who revisits Michael Jackson’s epoch-making album Thriller, 30 years after its original release. “One of the reasons Thriller still sounds so brilliant today,” Mossman writes, “is that what came next” – Jackson’s radical experiments with cosmetic surgery – “never enters your head.”

Elsewhere in the Critics: Alexandra Coghlan on pianist Ben Grosvenor at the Queen Elizabeth Hall; NS theatre critic Andrew Billen on Damned by Despair, This House and The River; Rachel Cooke on the BBC’s Dickens update, Nick Nickleby; Antonia Quirke on the sacking of Danny Baker of BBC London 94.9; Ryan Gilbey on Ben Affleck’s Argo; Thomas Calvocoressi visits a new gallery in the Parisian banlieue; and Will Self’s Real Meals.