The Beatles’ brilliant friendship
The Paul McCartney-John Lennon bond is a great story of boys and men, class and fame, love and jealousy
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Discover the latest non-fiction books and must-reads with the New Statesman’s expert reviews. Including biographies, music books, political writing and more.
How not to build a nation
Britain and the US lack the political will and legal means to innovate.
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Our overdiagnosis epidemic
How a marked rise in the treatment of certain conditions – physical and mental – is harming, not protecting, public…
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Dante’s divine autofiction
How the Italian poet’s search for self-knowledge changed the course of literature.
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Art and the ruins of the left
Can painting alter the course of our politics?
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Where to find meaning
As Christianity in Britain declines, two new books ask: what should we believe in now?
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Making China great again
The former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd writes that Xi Jinping has embraced an assertive nationalism that aims to put…
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The inattention pandemic
The tyranny of social media has made us all minor celebrities: exhausted and narcissistic.
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Shon Faye and the problem of love
In this memoir-cum-manifesto, the author explores the politicised nature of love – and why it seems to elude us.
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The long reign of the Caesars
Charlemagne and The Sopranos, Trump and I, Claudius – all owe a debt to the imperial biographies of Suetonius.
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The woman who made the rape kit
This story of Martha Goddard’s forensic method does more than reclaim her role in history – it gives her a…
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The contested life of Roger Casement
The Irish nationalist was caught in the fault lines between empire and nation, colonised and coloniser, public face and private…
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“There is no such thing as Starmerism”
An account of the Labour Party’s rise to power presents the PM as a man with a deep aversion to…
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The brutal world of the Brothers Grimm
The folklorists’ fairy tales, in which moral laws are suspended and violence abounds, were no stranger than the progressive fantasies…
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Bill Gates vs Ren Zhengfei
The Microsoft and Huawei founders have competing visions of technological dominance. Which will endure?
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The secret history of the poles
How glaciers hold the key to Earth’s deep past.
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How WG Sebald found his form
His studies of Austrian writers, at times more fiction than fact, offer a guide to the artist he would become.
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The radical women who made modern dance
A new book explores three generations of dancers who looked beyond the stage to turn movement into a tool of…
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The moderate voices of the English Civil War
A story of two friends who took opposite sides asks: does ideology always triumph over loyalty?
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The myth of the teenager
Adolescents suffer from an image problem. Matilda Gosling’s Teenagers: The Evidence Base looks at the facts to dispel unhelpful stereotypes.
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