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Boris Johnson’s fatal indecision flowed from a false divide between saving the economy and protecting public health.
A selection of the best letters received from our readers this week. Email letters@newstatesman.co.uk to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman magazine.
The Prime Minister blusters, equivocates and flounders. At a time of crisis, he has failed to learn what it means to lead.
The estimated 60,000 British Jews who voted for Labour in 2015, most of whom did not do so in 2019, were never given a loud enough voice in political discourse.
Labour has always had troubled relations with capital – but Starmer’s CBI speech to business leaders could herald a new era.
If Joe Biden had prevailed in Florida or Texas, we could have retired for the night. But we now face days and even weeks of uncertainty.
For Republicans, energy is a matter of economic growth and geopolitical strength; for many Democrats, it is about climate change. But both parties must tackle US dependence on China.
The Covid-19 crisis has accelerated the commercialisation of sexual intimacy, providing temporary relief not only from sexual frustration but also loneliness.
Hamilton upends so many of the expectations we place on our sporting heroes: that they remain uncomplicated, diffident, bound by our approval.
The traumas of the Covid-19 lockdown are all too real. We must appreciate that survival is not only a matter of preserving the body – emotional nourishment is vital, too.
Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.
The Edinburgh professor on why the government’s strategy failed and what it must learn from other countries to avoid future catastrophes.
With Donald Trump claiming to have won the US election even before all the votes had been counted, an extraordinary contest has left the republic more divided than ever.
How the Prime Minister blew his Churchillian moment.
Patriotism as most British people understand it is more like the old street football than belief in an ideology of some kind – something local and near to hand, open but partisan.
The pioneering geneticist saw through problems in mathematics and science, but was less clear-sighted in his politics.
A new poem by Steven O'Brien.
Why would we want to live in a world split between smug winners and humiliated losers?
Christie Tate’s Group is the latest in a long line of enjoyable, absorbing therapy memoirs. But is their appeal purely voyeuristic?
Marsh’s Enemy of the Raj, Kanneh-Mason’s House of Music, Woolfson’s Between Light and Storm, and Hag: Forgotten Folk Tales Retold.
American racism is best understood as a caste system, argues an important but imperfect new book.
A new exhibition at the British Museum reveals the power – and the precariousness – of the Arctic.
How the Flemish painter Paul Bril forged a new form of landscape art in baroque Rome.
In Noé’s drugged-out three-hour riff on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, de la Huerta gives perhaps her best performance yet.
Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant make for an unbelievable couple in this new TV thriller without thrills.
A BBC Radio 4 documentary marks the anniversary of the tragedy in south-east London 40 years on.
Each year on my windy Fife ridge, I await the coming of the geese.
October has hit me with an array of misfortunes, yet with a happy development in my personal life, things are looking up.
The sociologist Martin Doehlemann lays out four types of boredom, and I have experienced them all over lockdown.
We work through the different categories of pathology - infection, malignancy, metabolic ect, - that underlie all disease.
This column - which, though named after a line in Shakespeare's "Richard II", refers to the whole of Britain - has run in the NS since 1934.
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The writer discusses Dolly Parton, Victoria Woodhull and Carrie Bradshaw's outfits.
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