Issue: May 2026
Calypso and carnage
A seismic Test series and a harbinger of a new force in Test cricket
The sacrifice that changed Naipaul
The humiliation of his father, forced to slaughter a goat to atone for
angering Hindus, made the writer wary of insulting religion
Gruesome twosomes
Considering culinary mismatches
Infamous five
To most of us, the Cambridge Five are just names
Dignified design for the people
A book that asks all the right questions but hasn’t thought through all the answers
A country at war with itself
Washington politics can
best be understood through the history
of bitter factional in-fi ghting within both
the Democratic and Republican parties
Piano pair strike just the right note
Serendipity has delivered a double bill for the ages this month
Any foreigner can have a UK degree — for a fee
Every British university has been chasing the benefits of foreign income with frenzied excitement
Shining a light on the culture wars
Without the reintroduction of liberal ethical standards, the sacred purpose of academia cannot survive
Bonfire of the fallacies
Two opposing ideas about hard power and foreign policy — legalism and nihilism — are being exposed by the Trump
administration
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 and brutalism: listed, not loved
The visitor numbers and heritage status of the Southbank tell us nothing about what people actually want to look at
Not exiles, but stayers
White South Africans are not abandoning their home
The great American dream
Beware the lure of the vast US market
Graphics, games and occult entities
A retrospective of Treister’s work reveals the frictions in the artist’s motivations
The original sin
It should not have been difficult to see that there were problems with appointing Peter Mandelson
A Laboured response
Keir Starmer and his advocates are all out of ideas
The joys of village cricket
Cricket embodies much of what is valuable about our culture
Left-wingers are wallowing in post-truth politics
Complaints about right-wing “fake news” have obscured the biggest misinformation problem
The mother of all U-turns
Kemi Badenoch discovered that backing wars and opposing petrol prices is harder than it looks
The Farage flounce
A joke that worked, and an exit that didn’t.
We must end the tyranny of the Treasury
Short-term and parochial thinking has made us weaker and less safe