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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

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.

Michael Jackson Notebook

The news cycle of a dead celebrity is a curious thing.

Immortalised in print

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2001-2004, edited by Lawrence Goldman

Release Athanasiadis

A journalist who wrote for last week's Spectator has been detained by the Iranian regime. He should be freed immediately. 

Wild Life

Political parrot

Another Voice

Sleeping with Agatha Christie and the ghosts of guests past in Syria’s Baron Hotel

Confessions of a drink driver on a ‘rehab’ course

Banned for a year, James Hughes-Onslow found himself sent to a group discussion class every Friday in which two ladies schooled him in the art of sobriety on the road