Issue: May 2023
Dierdre Malone
Marginal Presence
Bringing the Bacchae to the bush
Chula finds a cultural confidence in Malawi that is lacking in the contemporary West
The technocratic face of authoritarianism
The dilemma of democracy continues to frame our predicament today
Plenty of atmosphere –– but only one ha-ha
If you want spice without obscurity, or the 1990s unfiltered, why not read something written back then?
Boxing clever
Racing has far better TV pundits than football
City of diamonds
The genius of the Antwerp Six
A tale of two tribes
The diverging fates of Central Europe’s Roma and Jewish musicians
Anatomy of a medical scandal
How not thinking can infect a workplace, community or entire culture
The country that went to the wall
From its birth after 1945, to its death after 1990
Deconstructing a giant of the screen
For a gay, Hegelian, terrorist-sympathising dialectician, Fassbinder was a rather conservative moviemaker
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
Britain needs a moral core
The UK’s greatest vulnerability isn’t its weakened military but its lack of spiritual depth
The pathologies of outdated ideologies
Our managerial elite will go the way of the Mamluks, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Moriori
Jonathan Ross’s existentialist hell
Jonathan Ross’s “crass” new TV show is surprisingly Sartrean
Soft competition
There are participation prizes to everyone at the Venice Biennale
Scotland should reject assisted suicide
It is dangerous, and arrogant, and premised on irrational fears
Out with the old?
Reform seems to be thriving, and Labour seems to be losing, but what can actually change?
Peston’s Inbox
Kemi doesn’t give her kids Easter eggs
Fence-sitting in a time of peril
Daniel Johnson condemns the Prime
Minister’s impotent handwringing when
America called for help in the Iran war
Who wants to be a patriotic millionaire?
More taxation will not solve our economic woes
Woke politics was never trivial
Wokeness was a lot more, and a lot worse, than a passing online fad
Manic and messianic
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Royal Shakespeare Company