New Statesman

Influencer culture is a blight, possibly a pestilence.

Newcastle’s Live Theatre sits down a side street from the law courts and the River Tyne, close to where four relatively unknown actors posed for the promo photo of Our Friends in the North, one of the most ambitious pieces of British television programming

The result of the Holborn and St Pancras by-election is roughly what was expected.

Perhaps Zack Polanski was never going to win Holborn and St Pancras.

Download the pdf here.

Download the pdf here.

Six months ago, Zack Polanski could have won.

Six months ago, Zack Polanski could have won.

Zack Polanski has lost the Holborn and St Pancras by-election.

Zack Polanski has lost the Holborn and St Pancras by-election.

Labour has held the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, with Sagal Abdi-Wali retaining the seat for the party despite a hard-fought contest from Green Party leader Zack Polanski.

Labour has held the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, with Sagal Abdi-Wali retaining the seat for the party despite a hard-fought contest from Green Party leader Zack Polanski.

Fifty-three Agar Grove sits at the heart of the north London constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, on a road bridging Camden Town and King’s Cross.

Fifty-three Agar Grove sits at the heart of the north London constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, on a road bridging Camden Town and King’s Cross.

The death of Jeffrey Archer unleashed a tsunami of bonhomie.

The death of Jeffrey Archer unleashed a tsunami of bonhomie.

There are few things more frustrating than being warned about a concerning situation you are fully aware of but can do literally nothing to change.

There are few things more frustrating than being warned about a concerning situation you are fully aware of but can do literally nothing to change.

Leaving the front gate of Hove-l Towers, I find, this fine Thursday morning, a wide spray of broken safety glass, like diamonds, on the corner of my street.

Leaving the front gate of Hove-l Towers, I find, this fine Thursday morning, a wide spray of broken safety glass, like diamonds, on the corner of my street.

Many visitors to Brighton, arriving by train, are lured along the main drag by the sight of the sea.

Many visitors to Brighton, arriving by train, are lured along the main drag by the sight of the sea.

The French passively claim credit for the croissant – what is more Gaulish than that?

Settling in to watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

In January 1993, a man called Jean-Claude Romand killed his wife, their two children, his parents and his parents’ dog, then took an overdose of sleeping pills and set fire to his home in eastern France, just outside Geneva.

Andy Burnham and Nigel Farage have something in common: neither man can stop talking about the Eighties.

Attempt 17ish: hand remains intact.

In 1892 Paul Signac helmed his small sailing boat into the harbour of the small port town of Saint-Tropez.

When I was younger, I thought America was one massive city.

English cricket is at odds with itself.

In her early seventies and originally from Quebec, Candice had an elegant Francophone accent and a barely concealed irritation with the daughter who’d brought her in.

The Social Network (2010) has steadily grown in stature: “hands down” the best film of the 2010s, says Quentin Tarantino.

Kemi Badenoch was preceded on stage at Conservative Party Conference today by her party chairman, Kevin Hollinrake, who supped his pint (it was before 11am but, to be fair, he was at a political party conference in Birmingham) and declared: “Everywhere I…

“How kings played, how they became enemies of one another, and how they murdered one another is found accurately recorded in history, and, if this were all that had happened in the world, it would have been ended long ago.”

When Vladimir Putin first came to power in 2002, he spoke a rapid, halting Russian.

I write this column as SW1’s travelling circus of politicians, think-tankers and lobbyists emerge, headachey and fuzzy-tongued, from the autumn party conference season.

“What is the point of controlling the world if you cannot control your own body,” the emperor Augustus complains in Robert Harris’s latest (and rather brilliant) novel, Agrippa.

It was a mild spring evening in March 2025, just after 6pm, when Jessie Hoffman shuffled the few steps from his holding cell into the death chamber at Camp F.

After winning the Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, Marlon James  considered writing a “quiet” novel about his fellow countrymen in the US, where he settled in 2007 fearing anti-gay…

John Gray’s articles always make you think (The NS Essay, 2 October).

The second season of The Celebrity Traitors is here.

There’s an arm-wrestle taking place in the sky.

In north London, we have been in by-election frenzy.

On 29 September, a laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East was admitted to hospital in the neighbouring town of Shelekhov.

The summer just passed was the hottest on record.

[Further reading: The Green Party’s Zionism reckoning]

Before the Cornell student who would come to be known as Jane Doe began to see herself as a victim of gang rape, she had thought of herself as one thing first: a “whore”.

An internal Conservative Party guide to campaigning produced before this year’s local elections  instructed: “Go duck hunting where the ducks are.”

When Andy Burnham met Donald Trump in the modernist UN building beside New York’s East River on 22 September, he looked nervous.

Party conferences should come with lists of things that do and don’t exist.