The Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle last month unexpectedly set the tone of the general election campaign when he appeared on BBC Radio 5 Live and declared that billionaires should not exist. With this pronouncement, Russell-Moyle brought the debate about billionaire wealth across … | Continue reading
Doom and gloom have greeted yesterday’s news that two left-wingers have won the dual leadership of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans are barely household names in their own party and were the underdogs in the run-off against the … | Continue reading
It’s easy to find shocking statistics on inequality. In the financial year ending 2018, the richest 20 per cent of UK households earned 47 per cent of all income, whilst the poorest 20 per cent earned just 4 per cent. The statistics on wealth inequality are even starker, with the … | Continue reading
Why are three million more of us working today in the UK than in 2008? How has our employment rate reached 76 per cent, when full employment before the crisis meant 73 per cent of us working? These are employment levels no one thought possible a decade ago (see graph below). The … | Continue reading
In a 2017 Netflix earnings call, broadcast to investors via YouTube, CEO Reed Hastings was asked about the looming threat of Amazon, which was then shovelling billions per year into its streaming services. But Hastings didn’t see any challenge from his purported rivals. Amazon is … | Continue reading
This wonderful book might be read as a long meditation on WH Auden’s notorious throwaway comment in his elegy for WB Yeats: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” John Burnside’s first chapter engages directly with this maxim, patiently showing us what it does and does not mean in its co … | Continue reading
People often give a personal explanation of whether they protect the privacy of their data. Those who don’t care much about privacy might say that they have nothing to hide. Those who do worry about it might say that keeping their personal data safe protects them from being harme … | Continue reading
Asked to explain “Why the novel matters”, my first question is: “Well, does it?” As soon as I typed that sentence, I then thought that the second logical question would probably have to be “Has it?” But, after typing that, I opened my browser and went to look at the news because … | Continue reading
For nine weeks in late 1888, two of art’s great loners lived together. The home and studio Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh shared was the small and unassuming “Yellow House”, just outside the northern city gate of Arles in the south of France. There was an imbalance to the arra … | Continue reading
By the time Clara Schumann died in 1896, she had had eight children, was one of the most famous pianists of the century, and had produced a significant body of original work. She is still best known as the wife of fellow composer Robert (who died in 1854, half a century before he … | Continue reading
The Man Who Fell From Grace has a name, but it’s not important. What’s important is the “Only God Can Judge Me” tattoo on his ribs with praying hands and rosary he referenced whenever he erred. What’s important is the way he laughed when he lost hand after hand after hand at Texa … | Continue reading
This week, the Financial Times launched an eye-opening series of articles on the disorderly state of world politics that calls for a “reset” of the global capitalist system to make it more inclusive and committed to “profit with purpose”. The intervention appears to mark a striki … | Continue reading
In February 1818, Samuel Taylor Cole-ridge was sent a copy of Songs of Innocence, William Blake’s first illustrated book of poems, which had been published some 30 years earlier. He was both impressed and discomfited by what he read. “You may smile at my calling another Poet a My … | Continue reading
Remember the Great Global Communications Revolution? Not much more than a year ago, it was the hottest topic around. We were all going to interact with whatever entertainment or information we wanted, whenever and wherever we wanted to, by plucking it from a limitless, virtual va … | Continue reading
In Pontius Pilate (1961), a Borges-like fiction by the French literary theorist and former surrealist Roger Caillois, the Roman governor of Judea who ordered the death by crucifixion of Jesus instead releases him under the protection of imperial legionaries. The charismatic Jewis … | Continue reading
If every philosopher has a home that is not a house – the mountains, the sea, the city streets – for Martin Heidegger, it was the Black Forest. This sprawling woodland, situated by the French border in south-west Germany, imbued Heidegger’s language – his writings are filled with … | Continue reading
American meritocracy stinks. It is, in Daniel Markovits’s opening shot, “a sham”. According to Markovits, the charge sheet against the once sweet-sounding idea of meritocracy is grave. Not only is it the root cause of the vast inequality that has opened up at the top of the incom … | Continue reading
One day in 1992, in the middle of London’s housing slump, a businessman from the freshly collapsed Soviet Union walked into a Kensington estate agent’s office. He and his two business partners each bought homes for cash, at prices ranging from £200,000 to £320,000. “This appears … | Continue reading
Klaus Fuchs, according to a 1951 report by the US Congress, “influenced the safety of more people and accomplished greater damage than any other spy not only in the history of the United States but in the history of nations”. That judgement seems unarguable: from 1941 to 1949 Fuc … | Continue reading
This summer, a department at the University of Sheffield sent an email to students. A group of them had complained about their marks for an end-of-year essay. While a few had received Firsts, these students were given 2:2s and Thirds. “Thank you for raising the issue,” began the … | Continue reading
The first time my mother tried Prozac, it was so fabulous, it felt like God. After 32 years of living with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, the idea that pain could end just like that was simple in a way that felt almost biblical. She spread the good news: she talked about campaigni … | Continue reading
While walking home on Thursday night, I was having a panic attack. It was one of many I had last week after a shooting in my hometown, and days spent of obsessively Twitter searching “trump dayton visit” had fried my brain and body. Beyond running those searches, everything else … | Continue reading
Until quite recently the liberal position was that there are no conspiracies – none, at any rate, of any historical importance. History consisted of long periods of chaos and stupidity, with occasional intervals when rational figures such as themselves were in power. Over time, r … | Continue reading
In Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, Richard Holmes described how, aged 18, he followed the route taken by Robert Louis Stevenson and his donkey almost 100 years earlier as they walked through the Massif Central in France. Sleeping, as Stevenson did, beneath the sta … | Continue reading
For almost two months, a wave of anti-government protests have rocked Hong Kong. Initially sparked by a government proposal to introduce a law that would allow the extradition of criminal suspects to stand trial in mainland Chinese courts, the protests have morphed into a broader … | Continue reading
Everything, it seems, is going badly. We are living through an age that has had its promise suffocated by austerity, that has exhausted us through precarity; an age where our leaders have weaponised hatred of immigrants to manufacture a constitutional crisis that no one seems abl … | Continue reading
Fascism is coming to America. Not simply out of an underground movement of far-right fantasists but from the US presidency. That’s the only rational conclusion we can draw from last night’s Trump rally in North Carolina. And I don't care how much this affronts your preconception … | Continue reading
What was Iris Murdoch like? She seems to slip so easily from view. Born 100 years ago in Dublin, she was raised in London, an only child in what she called “a perfect trinity of love”, yet she pursued a life of solitude, romantic intrigue and neurotic ambition. She invoked the hi … | Continue reading
It is difficult to know when humans first started securing or “encrypting” messages to hide them from unwanted readers; the practice must be almost as old as written language, although examples are sparse. We know, for example, that Julius Caesar used a simple form of letter subs … | Continue reading
The Times reported in 2005 that a property developer in Perthshire, Scotland, had been prevented from breaking the ground for some houses on land he had acquired because there was a fairy stone standing on it. Local people were seriously protesting against its removal: the rock w … | Continue reading
From 30,000 feet, Britain’s coastline has a familiar sweep and shape. Zoom closer in – to, say, the cliffs of Dover – and it becomes less easy to comprehend. All you can see is a confusing series of jagged edges; down on the beach, peering at rocks with a magnifying glass, the co … | Continue reading
Many, perhaps most, ideas are evil or delusive or both.” It is a remarkable conclusion for a book that argues with some force that ideas are the driving force of history – “not environment or economics or demography, though they all condition what happens in our minds”. If ideas … | Continue reading
Meet the Argentine ant, a nondescript fellow, just an ant really. Genetically we have little in common, but the American biologist (and ant photographer) Mark Moffett argues that, behaviourally, this ant is much closer to us than any chimpanzee or bonobo. This species, he says, “ … | Continue reading
Frontiers have a dynamism of their own in Graham Greene’s fiction, and typically set off a reflex of unease. The novelist’s father, Charles Greene, had been the pious Anglican headmaster of a public school in Berkhamsted near London, and each day the schoolboy Greene experienced … | Continue reading
Most people are unaware of the extent to which algorithms already make life-changing decisions on their behalf. Software can diagnose illnesses, shortlist you for a job interview or assess whether you should be granted parole. As machine learning and artificial intelligence becom … | Continue reading
Herbert George Wells was, in reputational terms, his own worst enemy. He was prolific: 51 novels, dozens of works of non-fiction, scores of short stories and countless newspaper articles. However, much of his output, especially in the second half of his career, was of questionabl … | Continue reading
St Augustine was probably the first major thinker to discuss at length how states use enemies for their own internal purposes. He traces with acid clarity the way in which the Roman Republic begins to collapse from its inner tensions and conflicts once Carthage, the great histori … | Continue reading
The 20th century marked the downfall of empire and the triumph of the nation state. National self-determination became the prime test of state legitimacy, rather than dynastic inheritance or imperial rule. After the Cold War, the dominant elites in the West assumed that the natio … | Continue reading
Between January and March 1961, the historian and diplomat Edward Hallett Carr delivered a series of lectures, later published as one of the most famous historical theories of our time: What is History? In his lectures he advises the reader to “study the historian before you begi … | Continue reading
On the morning of 2 September 1939, the Polish painter Józef Czapski, then 43 years old, slipped a slim volume of the memoirs of André Gide into his greatcoat pocket and headed off to war with invading Nazi forces. In a secret protocol to the Nazi-Soviet pact guaranteeing non-agg … | Continue reading
Some years ago the New Yorker banned desert-island cartoons from the magazine. The ragged, bearded fellow making satirical observations from his little patch of sand with its lone palm tree had become a tired formula. But he’s still with us, Wifi and social media now offering new … | Continue reading
Every day of the working week, I anxiously check WhatsApp for updates on “beef strip boy”. My friend who works in tech tells us near-daily tales of a man in her office who exclusively eats beef strips for every meal – microwaving (yes, microwaving) them, heralding them, and flood … | Continue reading
On 10 April, the New Statesman published a 900-word Encounter between George Eaton and the philosopher Roger Scruton. The Encounter is a short interview slot in the Observations section, which opens the magazine each week. The piece was also published online and promoted on Twitt … | Continue reading
It is difficult not to feel that JRR Tolkien’s name destined him for philological studies and perhaps in the end for the creation of imaginary worlds. There is a good deal about his name in a new film that takes as its title his unusual surname. At King Edward’s School in Birming … | Continue reading
Visions of a dystopian future owing to the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) are common. Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, for instance, last year raised the spectre of a robot dictatorship that could permanently rule over humanity. “At least when there’s an evi … | Continue reading
“They kept coming up on my Instagram Explore page,” Elena, a 17-year-old high school student from Ohio, tells me. “I used to see them all the time.” “It’s such a saturated genre of account,” Alex, an 18-year-old student from Maryland says. “I find at least three different ones I’ … | Continue reading
When Hannah Arendt was herded into Gurs, a detention camp in south-west France in May 1940, she did one of the most sensible things you can do when you are trapped in a real-life nightmare: she read – Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Clausewitz’s On War and, compulsively, the … | Continue reading