Audio Long Reads, from the New Statesman

Roy Jenkins, while serving as president of the European Commission, used to spend his mornings writing. The heads of state who visited him were often keener to speak about his biographies of Asquith or Gladstone than about new legislation. This integration of politics, scholarship and the media was once a feature of British intellectual life, from AJP Taylor to CP Snow, but today the space to thin...

On 15 November, despite a poor showing in the US midterm elections for the candidates he had backed, Donald Trump surprised no one in announcing his second run for the presidency. What does his official return to the political stage mean for the Republican Party – and for America, Russia and China? In this essay, the  New Statesman ’s China and global affairs editor Katie Stallard reflects on...

In 2001 Margaret Atwood began writing the novel  Oryx and Crake . She started from the idea of species extinction, including human extinction. How long have we got? And would we bring about our own demise?   The premise of  Oryx and Crake  was that, since we have the capability to bioengineer a virus capable of wiping out humanity, someone might be tempted to do just that – in...

On both sides of the Atlantic, the number of people being diagnosed with ADHD is rising. Psychiatry UK, which provides both private and NHS-funded assessments, reports that it is receiving around 150 ADHD referrals a day; in 2022 the organisation expanded its prescribing team from ten to 60. Why are more people being told they have ADHD? Partly, this is a course correction: adults who were diagnos...

Four years ago, the  New Statesman  published a long read by Jude Rogers marking the reissue of two landmark British films released at the height of the Cold War:  Threads  in 1984, and  When the Wind Blows  in 1986. Both films explore the devastating effects of nuclear attacks on ordinary people, and hoped to educate the public, as well as politicians, on the danger....

Rebecca Solnit has been writing about hope for nearly 20 years, starting with her 2003 essay "Hope in the Dark", which became a bestselling book of the same name. What began as a response to the cynicism that followed the invasion of Iraq ("we didn’t stop the war, we have no power, we can’t win") has evolved into a sustained argument for the value of protest. You have to take the long view, says S...

In 2014, the Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry guest-edited the  New Statesman  on the theme of the “Great White Male”. Perry, who is known for his subversive ceramics and tapestries as well as his cross-dressing alter-ego Claire, wanted to explore issues of gender, masculinity, Britishness, class and the grip that white male power still exerts on the UK’s culture and politics. I...

Even the most ardent carnivore might struggle to argue that meat is a force for good. The global livestock industry produces more greenhouse gases than the exhaust from every form of transport on the planet combined. And while doctors try to curb antibiotic prescription, 80 per cent of antibiotics used in the US are administered to healthy animals to minimise infections on crammed farms. Industria...

On 23 September 2022, the UK’s new prime minister and her chancellor delivered their explosive “mini-Budget”, cutting taxes for the richest in society and increasing government borrowing. Global markets were alarmed – but should the reality of Trussonomics have taken anyone by surprise?   In this reported long read, the  New Statesman ’s writer at large Jeremy Cliffe looks at the id...

Giorgia Meloni started out as the awkward outsider, a woman from humble Roman roots in an Italy whose politics have long been dominated by alpha men from the north – Silvio Berlusconi, Matteo Renzi, Beppe Grillo, Matteo Salvini. Now the post-fascist party she fronts - Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy, or FdI) – is widely expected to take the largest share of the vote in the 2022 general e...

The idea that, without capitalism, the planet might not be facing so great a climate crisis is well established, appearing in works like Naomi Klein’s bestselling  This Changes Everything  (2014) and from the growing ranks of “eco-socialist” activists. But in this essay, the science writer (and committed socialist) Leigh Phillips argues that an entirely socialist 20th century would have...

In 1947, on her 21st birthday, Elizabeth Windsor promised that when she ascended the royal throne she would serve “our great imperial family”. By the time of her coronation six years later, the Crown’s ties with empire were already significantly weaker. Yet for the duration of her 70-year reign, Queen Elizabeth II would remain a human link to old imperial Britain – the original “glo...

The shock of her death on 31 August 1997 sparked mass public mourning, a crisis within the royal family, and a test of the prime minister Tony Blair’s leadership. A quarter of a century later, how is “the People’s Princess” remembered?   Reporter Tanya Gold goes in search of the woman behind the myths, the movies and the conspiracy theories – visiting the Spencer family home, Althor...

For 50 years, the “mean old daddy” immortalised in one of Mitchell’s best-loved songs was an enigma. For the first time, he tells his side of the story to the New Statesman ’s lead interviewer, Kate Mossman. Kate and Cary Raditz met in Paris in late 2021 to talk about a love affair that began on the island of Crete in the spring of 1970, continued in California and England...

On 16 November 2021,  testified to parliament about his experiences of racism while playing for Yorkshire County Cricket Club. The off-spinner and former England youth captain said that, between 2008 and 2018, he had been repeatedly subjected to racial slurs, excluded and portrayed as a troublemaker. The fallout was catastrophic, at Yorkshire and across the professional game, with h...

Three years ago the  New Statesman  published a cover story showing how successive British governments have emaciated standards in UK university degrees, creating a generation of graduates with devalued qualifications, while costing the taxpayer billions. Since then, the “great university con” has continued unabated. Grade inflation has only increased, despite various declarations from m...

Why, six months into Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, is Germany still struggling to come to terms with the new European reality? For explanations, some point to the country’s reliance on Russian gas; others to the legacy of the Second World War or the Cold War. Yet, as Jeremy Cliffe argues in this essay from the  New Statesman ’s 2022 Summer Special issue, to fully understand Germany’s insti...

On Boxing Day 1920, 53,000 people watched the Dick, Kerr Ladies beat St Helens Ladies 4-0 at Goodison Park – the largest-ever crowd recorded for a women’s football match in England. The game had blossomed during the First World War, as lunch-break kickabouts at munitions factories evolved into 150 women’s clubs across the country. But months after the Boxing Day fixture, the sport was banned by th...

On 7 July 2022 Boris Johnson announced he would resign as Prime Minister. Despite surviving a series of scandals, Covid-19 and a parliamentary no-confidence vote, Westminster’s “greased piglet” was finally undone by the alleged sexual improprieties of his chief whip, Christopher Pincher, and the mass resignation of his cabinet. For many, the mystery was that such a policy-light, contradiction...

Soon after finishing his most recent book,  The Last Days of Roger Federer , the author Geoff Dyer decided to follow in his hero’s footsteps and have surgery. “Strictly speaking, I was following in the footsteps of Novak Djokovic and Stefanos Tsitsipas,” he writes, “in that I would be having surgery on my elbow (left) rather than a knee, but that’s just an anatomical detail.” Worsening tennis...

On the eve of the millennium, JG Ballard noted how “everything is clean and shiny but oddly threatening”. The dawn of the 1990s had heralded a period of economic prosperity, of globalisation, relative peace and hi-tech connectivity – but did we end the decade more divided than ever? In this deeply researched and wide-ranging essay, first published in March 2021, the  New Statesman ’s ideas ed...

The  New   Statesman ’s Pippa Bailey has long had a professional as well as a personal interest in the OED: she and the team of sub-editors she leads rely on the world’s most comprehensive dictionary to answer questions of meaning and spelling. So it was a labour of love when she visited its Oxford HQ to meet the lexicographers whose decisions – about which words are added, revised, or r...

In the wake of the pandemic, mental health referrals for adults and children have doubled. Has Covid sparked a parallel wave of mental illness? Or is grief and sadness a natural response to those months of isolation, uncertainty and daily death tolls?    In this richly reported long read,  New Statesman  associate editor and feature writer Sophie McBain talks to the patients an...

Music writer Pete Paphides has turned to songwriters and musicians, from Abba to the Undertones, to make sense of all the big moments in his life. So when he got the call he was dreading, to say that his father was dying, it was music that saw him through shock, denial and loss.    In this moving audio essay, read by the author, Paphides explores both the unpredictability of grief and th...

On June 21 2022, Prince William will turn 40. What kind of king will the second-in-line be: the moderniser who posed for the cover of Attitude magazine, or the relic behind a disastrous recent tour of the Caribbean? Freelance writer Tanya Gold sets out in search of the ‘real’ William, talking to former colleagues and collaborators, joining a royal visit to Wales, and hearing from the actor who pla...