Issue: February 2025
The Kunstkammer
A gallery that contains the curiosities of many peoples
When I talked over Franz Ferdinand
The only band I’ve seen and wish I’d been paying attention to
Your front-room friend
Whatever the teething troubles, wireless was a miracle that brought people together
Young man — there’s a place you can go …
Everything changes in the end and not always for the better
Can arias ever be the reel deal?
Most film adaptations have been pale imitations weighed down with charmless music
Let the people decide
Libel actions once heard by juries are now exclusively tried by judges alone
Bob Dylan biopic: tangled up in true
Afterwards, we can explain to them why it’s got all the details completely wrong
A land fit for apparatchiks
The government is “freeing up” billions of pounds to invest in the future of the Labour
Thomas Girtin: a YBA of yesteryear
At the time of his death, he had done more than Turner to show the possibilities of watercolour
December-January Letters: Stereotyping the Afghans
Foreigners should not damn the Afghans with low expectations
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
Unionists should unite
It’s time to build alliances to ensure that unionists are not let down again
Dumbed-down democracy
“Public opinion” is useless when the public is largely ignorant
From Wigton to Wadham College
The Oxford Bragg describes is almost as much another world to us now as it was to him then
The chairwoman of the board
A story driven at a whip-crack pace, pulsing with manic energy and nail-biting
Where is Britain’s vision?
Modern Britain has acquired a lack of national purpose, except for policies that are self-harming
The masculinity crisis is a porn crisis
We have to do more to challenge the reshaping of culture by pornography
A culture of death
Street gangs and online provocation are fuelling a morbid subculture in British life
Any foreigner can have a UK degree — for a fee
Every British university has been chasing the benefits of foreign income with frenzied excitement
Manchesterism is dead in the water
Andy Burnham already appears to have abandoned hope for meaningful change
What does it mean to be free?
Women are caught between different experiences of freedom and loss
Right-wingers must rediscover their principles
Internalising the logic of liberalism has made defeat inevitable