Issue: December/January 2023
Weighing up the real value of art
Why galleries are now cogs in a not-so-creative industry
All sweetness and light
Two hundred years after his birth, critic and poet Matthew Arnold still has much to teach conservatives
Ideology+competence = success
The Truss debacle does not refute the Thatcherite principle of sound money
Country church monuments
The hidden treasures of English churches
A forgotten writer brought to life
Shirley Hazzard stuck doggedly to exploring love — a theme unfashionable even then
A forever home
Architecture would be vastly more interesting if clients were happy to pay for character instead of accepting bland uniformity
The man who liberated the Ritz
David Bruce: “the last American aristocrat” renowned for his oenophilia
Happy Gothmas
Get your festive Morticia Addams on
Valuable life lessons
How to upset a “socialist” friend
Most Read
American strategy in Iran is wiser than it seems
President Trump’s intervention will leave the world safer than it was
Saint Nicola
Nicola Sturgeon wants sympathy for her husband’s crimes—but after years spent avoiding awkward questions, her latest reinvention may be the hardest sell yet.
The lonely death of Henry Nowak
We must draw lessons from a horrendous and disgraceful case
Rewatching the English
English identity has become too surreal and discomfiting to define
A failed war on fags
The black market has taken over the tobacco trade Down Under
Gradually, then suddenly
You don’t expect everything to change until it does
The misfits of Middagh Street
What a bunch: gifted and impossible to live with
Itamar Ben-Gvir, heel
The Israeli demagogue is a bleak but interesting model of a modern politician
Where are Britain’s moral voices?
On decriminalising abortion up to birth, the Archbishop of Canterbury must talk the talk, not walk the walk
I’m worried about Andy Burnham
If Burnham does to Britain what he has done to Manchester, we are in big trouble
A second Northern Ireland?
How the SNP squandered a major opportunity for independence
Mahmood music
Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms are a lot less tough than they sound
Good enough for politics
We should be more willing to declare some political problems solved
The decision-dodgers
The puberty blocker trial shows that outsourcing policy choices to experts isn’t working
Irish anti-Israel agitation is out of control
Anti-Israel sentiments among Irish nationalists are irrational and opportunistic
The dead-end art of conspiracy
Should art dissect conspiracy theories or immerse itself in them?