Issue: September 2020
Satire needs to find new targets
There are still plenty of institutions worth mocking
Pleasures of sex and berries
Hart explains why we’re adapted to the environment we evolved in, rather than the one we inhabit
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
Rats desert a thriving ship
The space for criticism to exist grows smaller and the archways that sustained its presence crumble away, laments Sarah Ditum
Women directors screened out
Christopher Silvester on Mark Cousins’s latest documentary
A grim chorus of philistines
Rishi’s £1.57 Billion handout to the arts sector is the last good news it’ll ever hear, says Robert Thicknesse
A spy all along
Morton Sobell went on trial for espionage with the Rosenbergs. His devotion to communism fascinated me
A worthy heiress to Princess Ida
Where has originality and character gone in the art of Violin playing?
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
The great creative course illusion
How universities mistook access to courses for access to creative life
Schrödinger’s schism
The Anglican Communion, for all of its internal disagreements, has yet to fall apart
Borne back into the past … of Bolton
Oh no, not another cliche!
The right has a conspiracy problem
Conspiracies exist — but the temptation to use them as an all-purpose explanation is wrongheaded
New model Auntie
David Elstein spells out the big decisions that Matt Brittin, the BBC’s new director-general, needs to make very quickly in order to save the Corporation
Europe should defend itself
European states should invest more in their own defence, and the US should let them
Murders for April
Make sure it is the cruellest month with this detective fiction
Farewell to a gentle jazz-lover
Scholarship trumps zealotry, particularly when it is veiled by modesty
So long, Socrates
Socrates turned relentless questioning into a way of life — and paid for it with his own
Laughing to hide the tears
Beware: prime ministerial jokes ahead
Our new five-party system
First-past-the-post no longer means
an electoral carve-up between the
Tories and Labour, allowing “fringe”
parties real political influence