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A majority at the Scottish parliamentary election would give the SNP an unarguable mandate for a second independence referendum, but it needs to explain what secession means.
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 biggest political test facing Johnson’s government is to keep the UK together. It is currently failing.
A small but vocal cohort of my SNP colleagues has engaged in performative histrionics redolent of the Salem witch trials.
Margaret Thatcher and Harold Wilson show the way for a struggling opposition leader: offer a serious argument, not a set of policies.
A new book alleging child sex abuse by a member of the Parisian intellectual elite has caused a sensation in France – and revived an old and troubling debate about consent.
The moment that Brexit appeared advantageous, Ireland became collateral damage in the EU’s need to cover its own vulnerability.
TV ratings for the Olympics have steadily fallen, especially among the young – as a crisis of relevance and the issues around hosting become too big to ignore.
Americans on both sides of the cultural divide are content with the twin risks of the coronavirus era: death and boredom.
Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.
The epidemiologist behind the Covid Symptom Study app reflects on the challenges of marrying real-time science with the priorities of government.
Andrew Neil needs GB News to get even with Rupert Murdoch and the Beeb. Nobody else does.
The scientist, who has died aged 87, effectively ended a 12,000-year-old geological era when he invented the “Anthropocene”.
The SNP is likely to win a resounding victory in the Scottish Parliament elections. How long can London hold off a second independence referendum?
Our strategic alliance with the Baltic states has survived centuries of upheaval. Now the mission is to contain the Russians and keep China out.
The Prime Minister is more popular as a leader than progressives would wish – but does he know his own country?
The chronicler of American counterculture was tormented by neuroses – until she learned to turn them to her advantage.
Spufford’s new novel is a quiet, contemplative book about the imagined future lives of children killed in a German V2 attack during the Blitz.
Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Sampson, Karachi Vice by Shackle, Lullaby Beach by Duffy and Maxwell’s Demon by Hall.
As two new books make clear, we cannot deny the influence of our colonial past on our society. But the empire is not the starting point of British history.
A new poem by Grey Gowrie.
The master of horror could write, direct and score his own films. So why did he give it all up?
Corinth’s Walchensee paintings proved popular with collectors – but they came at a cost.
It is Hanks’s curiosity, his intentness as he watches and listens, which lends him definition.
Alan Yentob’s film was predictably starry: he favours big guns, mostly male, at whose wisdom he can nod, thus looking (he hopes) wise himself.
Former staff accused Bon Appétit of fostering a racist work culture. Now, a new podcast series explains exactly what went on at the publication.
I dream of sipping Champagne in Paris. But, while I’m stuck at home and looking at wine even more than I normally do, an opportunity arises: to look with more dedication.
This accusation is a problem that the observational, humorous or lifestyle columnist is going to have to run into from time to time...
Glastonbury’s cancellation comes as another blow upon the painful bruise being felt by the whole music industry. Yet the magnitude of the crisis is under-recorded.
None of us GPs and nurses have been thanked so often and so fulsomely.
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 psychologist on character building, the myth of the hunter-gatherer, and why we need a four-day week.
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