Current issue

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Labour’s U-turn on social housing for non-immigrants is welcome but too late

Rod Liddle says that metropolitan liberal ideology is too deeply ingrained in local councils, social services and the judiciary to be overturned by one panic measure driven by Labour’s sudden fear of the BNP

To become an extremist, hang around with people you agree with

Cass Sunstein — co-author of the hugely influential Nudge and an adviser to President Obama — unveils his new theory of ‘group polarisation’, and explains why, when like-minded people spend time with each other, their views become not only more confident but more extreme

Who would have thought a herd could moonwalk?

The acclaimed web theorist, Mark Earls, says that the death of Michael Jackson unleashed the extremes of collective action: mass mourning and sick jokes

A splendid lunch with Jimmy McNulty

In the first of an occasional series of interviews over meals, Deborah Ross talks to Dominic West about The Wire and the challenge to an Old Etonian of playing an American cop

What Jacko needed was someone to say ‘No’

My defining memory of Michael Jackson — vulnerable, brilliant, otherworldly — is of watching him dance to the soundtrack of a movie.

Moscow Notebook

Before boarding the flight to Moscow, it dawned on me that I might have somehow contracted swine flu from Michael Nyman.

This papal visit is a good time to reprieve Pius XII

Simon Caldwell says that the wartime Pope was no Nazi sympathiser: on the contrary, he was a thorn in Hitler’s side and a protector of persecuted Jews

Wales and the Welsh are no longer a dismal joke

A decade after the first elections to the National Assembly of Wales, Harry Mount says that the principality is at last escaping its dire caricature. No, really

A Blogger's Notebook

Guido Fawkes outlines his role in the downfall of Damian McBride

The C of E has forgotten its purpose. Why, exactly, does it exist?

Rod Liddle offers an Easter message to the leaders of the Church, who have ditched its traditions and reduced it to a sort of superannuated ad-hoc branch of social services. It has lost all sense of mission and direction. Whatever happened to muscular Christianity?