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Will Lloyd's piece on Charles (Cover Story, 5 May) is an eye-opener--both the Transylvanian follies and the influence of the neo-Romantic writer Kathleen Raine, which explains much about the regressive [...]

As your Leader (23 September) points out, Liz Truss's pro-growth provisions do not stimulate growth, as the rich save while the poor spend disposable income. It also suggests raising Universal [...]

Your Leader ('A planet on fire', 22 July) concludes, 'The world is already burning. It is not too late to change.' Yet it also refers to Andrew Marr's less optimistic [...]

A statement by the chief executive of Unilever, quoted in your Leader ('The message to the planet', 18 September), encapsulates current fears: 'there will be no jobs or prosperity on [...]

John Gray is, as ever, thought-provoking and eloquent (Cover Story, 3 April). But, as ever, he is predicting and longing for the collapse of the liberal world order and its [...]

Joe Haines (Correspondence, 8 November) argues that Labour would have won the 2017 election 'by a street' if it weren't for Jeremy Corbyn. He might well be right about the [...]

The Editor's Note (23 March) broaches the subject of the common good, not in terms of the all-pervasive utilitarian values of the modern world, but in terms of the moral [...]

Your Leader ('The chill winds of isolation', 7 June) is right to warn that '... leaders must with dispassionate realism face the world as it is ...' Sometimes, however, the [...]

The article by Matthew Goodwin ('The end of trust', 3 May) made many excellent points but could have benefited from mentioning the work of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, which [...]

Richard J Evans ('How the Brexiteers broke history', 16 November) cites numerous instances of the misrepresentation of history by Brexiteers, a telling example being Jeremy Hunt's comparison of the EU [...]

'The establishment,' says Adrian Pabst in 'The politics of the void' (24 August) 'has no convincing story to tell about who peoples and nations are'. This observation prompts one to [...]

What a marvellous article by Jason Cowley ('England rising', 6 July). As a southern Irish woman living in England (London) for 41 years, I've felt for a long time rather [...]

John Gray ('Age of the strongman', 25 May) claims that 'anti-Semitism is an integral part of a new style of politics promoted by the leader of the Labour Party'. This [...]

Paul Mason in 'The meaning of Marxism today' (Cover Story, 4 May) broaches the subject of the Marxist theory of alienation (man's tendency to embody our concept of self in [...]

Your Leader (5 January) quotes Andrew Adonis on the Tories' bailout of Virgin and Stagecoach as 'indefensible'. Returning to London from Edinburgh after Christmas I experienced the squalor of Virgin [...]

Graham Allison's article makes it clear that Xi Jinping's 'China dream' is for the country to join or perhaps supplant the US as a superpower leading the world ('The chairman [...]

Margaret Thatcher's use of economic policy to justify 'privatisation, tax cuts for the rich, anti-trade union laws', (Observations, 20 October), gave rise to econocracy: 'a society in which political goals [...]

George Eaton quotes Walter Scheidel's research indicating that significant equalisation has only ever been achieved by the 'Four Horsemen of Levelling' --in other words by violence or pandemics (Obervations, 25 [...]

It was disappointing to read the report about divisions among Labour MPs (Politics Column, 20 November). It gives me no pleasure to highlight my MP in this respect but Ben [...]

Yuval Harari's call for a new global identity to manage a set of unprecedented ecological, economic, technological and scientific challenges is probably too optimistic and, in any case, may have [...]

'If ... the tectonic plates are shifting,' writes Armando Iannucci (Another Voice, 26 May), 'they're the quietest tectonic plates I've ever heard.' Indeed, if 'democracy is on the line', rage [...]

A widespread and continuing theme of political commentary today is that Labour cannot win elections under Corbyn. Take Roy Hattersley's Notebook (3 March): 'It is the Corbynites who are complicit [...]

According to Tristram Hunt ('The new fault lines', 6 January), the communitarian-cosmopolitan axis says more than the left-right divide of the past. It has certainly thrown light on the inequalities [...]

In his interview with George Eaton ('I'm pretty red', 26 August), Owen Smith points out that elections for leaders are very often won by political 'sleepers', not by activists. But [...]

Your Leader on the aftermath of the referendum (24 June) quotes later Shakespeare: 'The weight of this sad time we must obey.' Possibly so, but for how long? Anything is [...]

George Eaton's conversations with Jon Lansman (Politics Interview, 20 May) reveal the essential contradiction at the heart of Labour: a left-wing party cannot win power without taking the mainstream with [...]

Shiraz Maher's 'Burning the earth' (13 November) was fascinating and horrifying. The past 14 years of the 'war on terror' would seem to be a failure. I wonder if there [...]

Peter Kellner ('Running out of road', NS Essay, 25 September) writes that in his 32 years as an MP Jeremy Corbyn never seems to have 'said or written anything that [...]

I was interested to discover, reading Jason Cowley's interview with the Chancellor ('Ascent of the Submarine', 11 September), that George Osborne thinks that he has discovered his inner Michael Heseltine. [...]

Laurie Penny (Fighting Words, 21 August) puts the case for principles over power better than any other. Since 1997 the left, under the banner of New Labour, has been headed [...]

Tom Holland ('The glory and the myths of Magna Carta', 5 June) claims: 'Every country needs its myths.' However, when David Cameron is able to adduce Magna Carta as the [...]

If politics is civilisation, as one of your contributors contends, it is necessary to ask if we live in a civilised society ('Unleash the tribes', 17 April). The one minority [...]

Angus Roxburgh tells us that the Scots are possessed of 'high-minded values' (Observations, 5 September). Presumably the rest of us are not. It is this type of nationalism--the assumption of [...]

Mehdi Hasan (Lines of Dissent, zi February) quotes the US economist Dean Baker as referring to 'nanny-state conservatives'. Toryism, the hard-headed philosophy of survival of the fittest, has always been [...]

Russell Brand ('We no longer have the luxury of tradition', 25 October) has never voted because, he says, 'it seems like a tacit act of compliance'--which it is. He appears [...]

Colin Tudge's 'idyll' ('Meat market', 22 February) of a lost world of small-scale, organic farming is surely just that--an idyll. Our neoliberal world, born of the harsher reality of want [...]

At this time of Olympic euphoria, John Pilger (World Citizen, 23 July) reminds us that Dow Chemical, sponsor of the games, manufactured toxins used by the US against Vietnam in [...]

John Pilger (World Citizen, 26 September) is one of the very few media commentators to put the riots in the context of an extreme form of neoliberalism in which ordinary [...]

Sophie Elmhirst (NS Profile, 18 July) quotes Arundhati Roy, who, living in luxurious isolation in Delhi, confounds expectations with her claim to be one of those people 'with natural antagonism [...]

Archbishop Williams rightly highlights 'an understandable anxiety about what democracy means' (Leader, 13 June). In view of the PM's sweeping 'big society' policies that we did not vote for, one [...]

Mehdi Hasan (Politics Column, 21 March) says it will be the political rather than the financial influence of the union movement that will be on display on at the TUC [...]

Laurie Penny ('No drugs. No sex. And no leaders', 31 January) describes our students' desperate struggle for freedom in a world politically dedicated to virtually untrammelled free markets, permanent growth [...]

Colin Blakemore enjoins us to 'trust in science; it's the only solution to the problems we face' (The NS Interview, 16 August). But Oliver James ('A law of nature, a [...]

Mehdi Hasan may have been writing of the Conservatives (The Politics Column, 28 June), but New Labour was also a nasty party. It's time for a debate on the meaning [...]

John Pilger writes (World Citizen, 24 May) that 'the new PM, like his predecessor, describes his demands that ordinary people pay the debts of crooks as 'fiscally responsible''. That the [...]

David Miliband (Cover Story, 25 January) says 'the great mass of the fighters [insurgents in Afghanistan] are driven by pride or the pursuit of profit or power'. Is this not [...]

The cobweb of deceit eternally spun by the executive and its abject servants, the media and the courts, is exposed time and time again in the New Statesman by John [...]

Stephen Green rightly believes that any crisis will pass ('Seeking salvation', 6 July), but overlooks one thing: a crisis may have a terminal ending. Capitalism may well be the best [...]

Martin Jacques rightly claims that 'the political class is standing naked ... there is no political alternative waiting in the wings ... ready to storm the citadels of power' (NS [...]

'The irony is extraordinary' and the policies of our leaders are 'bizarre', writes Mark Lynas ('Food crisis: how the rich starved the world', 21 April). He does not exaggerate, but [...]