History
How Blair won over Conservative Britain
Like Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair won big in enemy territory. Can Starmer do the same?
The moral blindness of Putin’s generals
Russia’s murderous tactics to “de-Nazify” Ukraine have made its military leaders doppelgängers for the senior officers who executed Hitler’s evil plans
Love letter to the printed word
On the material culture of the book
How Labour lost the “unlosable election”
With living standards in decline, the Tories won in 1992 against the odds. Will this next election be the same?
The fall of Port Stanley
Letters from the Falklands front: no April fool
Georgia on my mind
There is an exodus of Muscovites with money to Tbilisi and Turkey
A vivid chronicle of chroniclers
Richard Cohen’s history of histories is a gargantuan achievement
Fight things that really matter
We must not capitulate to self-indulgent and hypocritical student outrage over Cambridge’s Seeley Library
The City’s disenfranchised voters
As the City of London goes to the polls, why are thousands being denied the right to vote?
The Critic Books Podcast: Roaring Girls
The extraordinary lives of history’s unsung heroines
Most Read
The establishment is still living in an immigration fantasy land
It is influential left-wingers, not the broader public, who have deluded themselves on mass migration
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.
On Britain as a capitalist command economy
It is neither neoliberal nor socialist but a secret third thing
Rewatching the English
English identity has become too surreal and discomfiting to define
The sickness of Sickfluencers
Social media and AI are enabling the exploitation of our benefits system
Not exiles, but stayers
White South Africans are not abandoning their home
So long, Socrates
Socrates turned relentless questioning into a way of life — and paid for it with his own
Is this the end of art?
Cultural renewal cannot simply chase demand
Hope and stories
Bicinia (Claves)
The dark side of the White House
As in ancient Rome, power politics are always a promising arena for drama
QAnon for centrist dads
Peter Chappell’s What If Reform Wins is less a political forecast than a Westminster panic attack in novel form
Beauty from the ruins of war
Painting gave artists and their viewers a temporary way out of the grim wartime reality
The Falklands tragedy
British weakness is endangering the Falklands
Zackonomics is incoherent and outdated
Zack Polanski is a great political entrepreneur but he is terrible at economics
Tolerating the intolerant — and the intolerable
The right’s refusal to confront political Islam has helped entrench it in Britain