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Sunday 20 July 2008

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The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Clemency Burton-Hill

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Politics

Brown bottles out, no election this year

Gordon Brown has ruled out an election this year following a poll of marginal seats that showed Labour significantly behind the Tories. No election is now expected until 2009. Coffee House has reaction and analysis to this news.

Click here to read the latest from our political team.

The cross-party consensus on welfare reform echoes the Gingrich–Clinton revolution

Fraser Nelson on the coming political week

Glasgow East is Brown’s dirty little secret: a hideous, costly social experiment gone wrong

Glasgow East symbolises — as few other places in Britain can — the fact that the problem Labour faces is not just lack of leadership but lack of mission. What is to be seen in this constituency encapsulates and dramatises Labour’s abject failures to comprehend, let alone tackle, the nature of the poverty which grips our council estates.
For all the latest on the Glasgow East by-election, visit Coffee House

Some advice for Brown’s second year: find a John Reid and bring back Charles Clarke

Steve Richards reviews the week in politics

WEB-EXCLUSIVE, LONGER VERSION: Poor, brave David Davis has become the Eddie the Eagle of Westminster

An extended version of Fraser Nelson's latest politics column

Arts

Perfect prose

National Short Story Award (Radio 4)

Wasted journey

Free Outgoing (Royal Court), Fanshen (295 Regent St), Frozen (Riverside)

Books

A Soho stalwart

The house that Jock built

James Fergusson reviews a history of the publishers John Murray

Style & Travel

Club class

Julia Hollander leaves her hair shirt at the departure gate

A honeymoon on horseback

Olivia Glazebrook and her husband brave the Jordanian wilderness

If the liberal press is to be believed, nobody has ever been stabbed — ever

Rod Liddle imagines the hoodie at home, allegedly innocent of any wicked intent, arming himself with a Stanley knife only because of the supposed alarmism of the right-wing media

Rod Liddle

Big Brother versus YouTube: let the Beijing Games commence

Mark Leonard, Britain’s pre-eminent analyst of modern China, says the Olympic genie is out of the bottle. The prospect of global scrutiny has actually increased repression as the authorities try to stamp out dissent. But digital technology is impossible to police

Mark Leonard

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