The infinite art of John Donne
His life was blighted by poverty, but his poetry made exhilarating connections between sex, faith and death.
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Rowan Williams
Rowan Williams is former Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, and a contributing writer to the New Statesman.
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Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is a fantasy of exceptional beauty
The author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell returns with this remarkable novel.
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Shakespeare in disrupted times
“Shakespearean” as an adjective has had an unexpected currency in contemporary political journalism – but there are so many…
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Covid and confronting our own mortality
The pandemic has forced us to confront the issue of death: how do we think about dying, and what…
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Breaking the Renaissance myth
Culture and the universal genius were not the only things to thrive in this supposed golden age – so…
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From the NS archive: The government needs to know how afraid people are
9 June 2011: Rowan Williams, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, offers advice to the coalition.
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Hilary Mantel’s complex, conflicted Thomas Cromwell
Much has been made of the idiosyncrasy of Mantel’s treatment of Cromwell. But as her new novel demonstrates, she…
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Oliver Cromwell, the man who wouldn’t be king
For Cromwell, getting rid of Charles I was the easy bit. What came next was the problem.
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The road not taken: Rowan Williams on how he narrowly avoided becoming a monk
Two roads, really. I had settled in my early teens – thanks largely to a couple of brilliantly imaginative…
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