The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Sellotape and string pants

With fuel prices rising and temperatures dropping, Robert Gore-Langton reveals his guide to surviving the winter on the cheap

Withdrawal from heroin is a trivial matter

Theodore Dalrymple is outraged by the mollycoddling of drug addicts coming off heroin and the notion that their predicament is a matter of human rights

The natural order of things

Matt Ridley says that Darwinian selection explains the appearance of seemingly ‘designed’ complexity throughout the world — not just in biology but in the economy, technology and the arts

Onward Christian Zionists

Rod Liddle on the crazed, quasi-fascist evangelicals in Britain and America who believe war in Gaza heralds the Second Coming of Christ

Moderate Arab states need Israel to succeed

Douglas Davis says that if Hamas holds out it will shift the balance of power in the Middle East further towards Iran and the radicals

Best of British: breakfast with Lily Allen

Matthew d’Ancona talks to the quintessentially English pop star about growing up, her longing to have children, celebrity culture, US politics and her new album

The real lesson of this fiasco is that we need elected police chiefs

The Commons row on Monday over the Damian Green arrest was a distraction from the most pressing issue, say Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell. We already have a politicised police: so let the voters decide

Obama is just Bryan Adams without music

O’ar Pali talks to the ageing Canadian rocker and realises that the President-elect has merely emulated the pious pop-star rhetoric that has made Adams a global brand

The global force behind Mumbai’s agony is in our midst

Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Al-Alawi say that LET — the Army of the Righteous — is a worldwide Islamist organisation which is well-established in Britain. The Mumbai atrocities are further proof that the march of Islamic extremism is the central fact of our time

Want to cut taxes? First cut spending. Here’s how

After a week of clamorous competition between the parties over tax cuts, Fraser Nelson offers a guide to paying for them: a programme of spending cuts that would preserve core services but shave off the fat of the Brown years. All that is needed is political will