Books
Brass and bullshit
Influencer is just another name for snake-oil salesman
Very essence of a Jewish writer’s life
Howard Jacobson stands his life on its head
Writing outside the box
Elena Ferrante’s essay collection is an exploration of the delights and constraints of form
The unheard lessons of howling feedback
Separating the signal from the noise
A return, a reissue, a brilliant new voice
The best, and the not-so-great, new fiction to read this month
When bad reviews attack
Book reviews are not the preserve of the literary dilettantes — they have real power
Wonders and warnings from the ancient world
A new history of Byzantium reveals the inner workings of a late antique empire
Strange happenings back in the USSR
The brilliant story of a Francis Bacon exhibition in Moscow
The lady vanishes
TV adaptations have masked the complexity and skill of Agatha Christie
Why modern novels are so boring
Writers who forget bourgeois aspiration lose a dimension
Most Read
Tame Impala fails to impress
unconquered by a
taste of Crusader food
Gary Stevenson is wrong about wealth taxes
The popular economist is irritating, but more importantly he is mistaken
Why they hated Ann Widdecombe
Fair-minded people could agree or disagree with her opinions. Left-wing bigots hated her for not abandoning them
What is wrong now was wrong before
Julia Gillard should not pretend that the “unintended consequences” of the gender debate were unknowable
Ethnic minorities are abandoning Labour
It is not just Muslim voters who have been abandoning the Labour Party
The problem with price freezes
Freezing prices is not half as simple (or cheap) as politicians often think
Regulations without services
How the state is prohibiting without providing
Drill, baby, drill
We need Cornish lithium and tin just as much as North Sea oil — whatever the nimbys say
Critical briefing: Unite the Kingdom
What you need to know about the Unite the Kingdom march on May 16
Grooming gangs and the truth
We should not give ammunition to deniers of the grooming gangs scandal
The ends of Pan-Africanism
An exhibition devoted to Pan-Africanism avoids important political and aesthetic questions
What is the CID for?
Zac Brettler’s short life and mysterious death
Taking the Sheen off
Shiny old lies remain the very bedrock of our trade
The dog that failed to bark
Jeremy Corbyn hoped the local
elections would be a launch pad for
his new party. Instead, Your Party
has mostly been arguing with itself
Leaving the ECHR would not make Britain like Russia
The case for opposing withdrawal is currently intellectually fatuous
Save our green and pleasant land
It’s time to stop ruining Britain’s countryside with drab, identikit houses and instead build real places with focus, heart and purpose