Audio Long Reads, from the New Statesman

Since Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, stole an election two years ago his regime, already one of the most repressive in Europe, has been cracking down on opponents real and imagined. These include the fanatical supporters – “ultras” – of Belarusian football clubs, inspired by tales of Ukrainian football hooligans joining protests in Kyiv which led to the removal of a pro-Russi...

On 17 June 1972, a nightwatchman stumbled across a burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC – triggering what became known as Watergate, the investigation that ultimately led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.   Fifty years on, the historian Colin Kidd reflects on Watergate’s renewed relevance in a populist, post-Trump era. Did the scandal help fuel t...

When George Orwell travelled to Spain in the winter of 1936 to fight General Franco and the fascists, he stopped en route in Paris, where Henry Miller gave him his coat. The two men could not have been more different: the passionately political Englishman, and the American who disdained of all forms of activism. As Ian McEwan writes: “In a letter to Lawrence Durrell he wrote that he knew he could...

It started with an innocent question posted on Yahoo! Answers  in 2009, and snowballed into a thriving subreddit community: did anyone remember an American movie from the early Nineties called  Shazaam , starring the comedian Sinbad as an incompetent genie who grants wishes to two children? Thousands of people did, vividly – and yet there was no trace of it. In this compelling long read,...

It launched with a promise to shake up the staid world of television news – to challenge broadcasting’s perceived liberal, left-wing bias. One year on, and faced with a new rival in TalkTV, how is GB News’s revolution going? Freelance writer Stuart McGurk spent several months reporting the inside story, as told by staffers past and present: those who were there for a chaotic June 2021 launch, thos...

What does Vladimir Putin owe Stalin? In this week’s audio long read, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore reflects on the parallels between the two Russian leaders, from their formative years to their ultimate reckoning in the history books.    Putin keeps half of Stalin’s library in his office, annotated by the former dictator, and has embraced the Soviet cult of ruling through fear and...

Stretched to breaking point by the pandemic, health services around the world are in crisis – with staff exhausted and demoralised, many of them quitting as a result. England alone is at least 6,000 GPs short of the government’s stated 2024 target – a recruitment pledge of the last election which it has already abandoned.   The  New Statesman ’s medical editor, Phil Whitaker, a practisin...

On 7 June 2020, the statue of the former slave trader Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol during a Black Lives Matter protest – an act that, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police in Minnesota, US, reverberated around the country. Eighteen months later, Tom Lamont spent a month at the trial of the four protesters charged with its fall. As he writes, the UK government and others “vie...

On the eve of the 2022 French presidential election, the New Statesman ’s writer-at-large Jeremy Cliffe caught a train from Courseulles-sur-Mer on the north coast of France to Marseille on the Mediterranean. Stopping in Caen, Paris and Vierzon along the way, he heard how contemporary France is reshaping itself in the long shadow of Charles de Gaulle – and against the backdrop o...

When the Taliban took control of Kabul in August 2021, the Koofi family were among 8,000 Afghans airlifted to safety in the UK, as part of the government’s Operation Warm Welcome. The New Statesman ’s Sophie McBain met them in a hotel in the north of England soon afterwards, where they were waiting to be resettled. As the months passed, she followed their new life, as well as that of the...

The anti-ageing industry is bankrolled by some of the wealthiest people on Earth, including Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel. Are the scientists it employs close to a cure? And if they are, who wants to live forever anyway? Jenny Kleeman meets the entrepreneurs who say that a 120th birthday is within reach, and critics who argue that life extension is the pinnacle of elite narcissism. &nb...

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...

Audio Long Reads  is a new podcast from the  New Statesman , showcasing the best of our reported features and essays, read aloud. Ease into the weekend with stories and analysis from our authors – including Kate Mossman, Jeremy Cliffe and Sophie McBain – published every Saturday morning.    Just search for  Audio Long Reads  from the  New Statesman  wherever...