Books
An awful warning
Ainsworth’s fate was sealed not how he wrote but what he placed at the heart of his stories
From Brick Lane to Brixton
Stoddard Martin delves into a world beyond police and courtroom, with its own code of right and wrong, in Gerald Jacobs’s Pomeranski
Anyone for abdication?
A vivid retelling of an infamous constitutional crisis
Mapping the Blob
The Long March draws together evidence that we half knew but shied away from
Time flies, relatively speaking
The older you are, the quicker you count out a minute
A forgotten poet of the people
The legacy of a left behind war poet
All dressed up and raring to go
A brilliant, ambitious volume of art history — but physically difficult to read
Remembering The Merchant of Prato
A vivid picture of Italian domestic life on the eve of the Renaissance
No place for idealists
A highly informative history of ideas let down by a drumbeat of liberal bias
The Spy, the Scholar and the British Academy
David Cannadine’s thoughtful commentary of the Anthony Blunt affair utilises previously unpublished sources
Most Read
The Book of JO’B
James O’Brien’s aggressive incuriosity is becoming ever more embattled as his worldview crumbles
A failed war on fags
The black market has taken over the tobacco trade Down Under
Thank God for Brexit
The EU is a bureaucratic monster and Britain is better off out
I don’t trust the British state
British institutions simply are not functioning in the interests of the people they are meant to serve
The lonely death of Henry Nowak
We must draw lessons from a horrendous and disgraceful case
From triple lock to price caps
Opinium polling for The Critic reveals the totemic pension policy has entrenched a politics that demands control over growth
The flawed thinking behind state suicide
Kathleen Stock demonstrates the value of a philosopher’s analytical mind in a sharp critique of assisted suicide
Britain should have voted against reparations
The moral and historical arguments for “reparatory justice” are bogus
The pathologies of outdated ideologies
Our managerial elite will go the way of the Mamluks, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Moriori
English football is not boring
Greater competition is being confused with dullness
Rich portrait of a master poet
Auden, Peter Ackroyd
The resistible centrism of Mark Gatiss
Why a centre-left worldview struggles to understand dissent
Jonathan Ross’s existentialist hell
Jonathan Ross’s “crass” new TV show is surprisingly Sartrean
The shape of a different Britain
Early modernist homes in Frinton-on-Sea capture a moment of confidence in a rapidly changing world
Defending liberalism from its defenders
Liberalism should mean anything but a more interventionist state
An uneasy peace amid the ruins
Four million citizens of Damascus remain uncertain of what the future will bring