Search

Prominent on the home page of the Back Boris website (www.backboris.com) is a box counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to the London mayoral election. For casual visitors [...]

January King Charles II, who created the Post Office, is probably shifting uneasily in his grave, for New Year means farewell to the Royal Mail monopoly and hello to a [...]

In Washington in the spring of 1954, the scientist Isidor Rabi gave evidence at the McCarthy-style security hearings on Robert Oppenheimer, by then world-famous as the father of the atomic […]

It is morning in the London home of James Bond and the secret agent is between missions. Waking--alone, for once--he can hear his housekeeper busy with the Chemex coffee machine. [...]

There are quite a few Labour voters in South Dorset: at the last count 19,027, to be precise. This was just enough to squeak the Labour MP, Jim Knight, into [...]

Dateline -- London. Week two of the state of emergency: getting around is already more difficult--at Waterloo Station on Tuesday, I noticed that several trains were running late, or were [...]

Stop and search powers continue to damage race relations. Yet the Home Office is reluctant to abandon them. Brian Cathcart on new evidence that they do more harm than good [...]

Quick to point out the errors of others, newspapers need better systems for correcting theirs When the wrinkled old chestnut of press regulation comes up for debate, as it does [...]

Brian Cathcart, after going through the New Statesman archives, envies older generations who enjoyed the full fury of the class war One week near the beginning of the 1930s, the [...]

In 1956, when he wrote the philippic against Anthony Eden that appears overleaf, Malcolm Muggeridge was waging a class war, open war against rule by the upper class. By the [...]

Can you imagine hearing about Adams or Paisley only in quiz questions? That's when we shall know Ulster's troubles are truly over, argues In a few years from now, Northern [...]

A century of weekly journalism by some of the great writers of the age makes a mighty quarry for the geologist to wander into with his hammer. This supplement, the [...]

Press hysteria over sewage-fed cattle is the stuff of taxi-driver politics. But xenophobia and boycotts won't help British farmers. By now you will have switched your millennium order from real [...]

The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius Graham Farmelo Faber & Faber, 495PP, £22.50 In 1971, when Florida State University offered a post to Paul Dirac, [...]

You may have missed it: at the High Court in London on 15 October, Express Newspapers agreed to pay £375,000 in libel damages to the so-called 'Tapas Seven', the friends [...]

If there is one political question that needs to be addressed today it is this: what sort of prime minister would David Cameron be? The voters may have decided they [...]

I only allowed myself to say it a few times, but I admit I enjoyed it: 'I'm in a play, you know. This summer, at the Edinburgh Festival.' Then, to [...]

In the week when the Guantanamo Bay detention camp was five years old, campaigners staged a protest vigil opposite Downing Street. Interest was high, and many reporters, photographers and TV […]

After the end of the public inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence affair, I visited a police officer who was a patient in the Priory. He was blameless, indeed he had […]

But is this evidence of a grumpy, hostile, paranoid and fantasy-prone fourth estate--or is it nothing more than a mirror of popular feeling, reflecting Euroscepticism rather than causing it? The […]

Walk southwards out of Ilulissat, past the last of the brightly coloured timber houses, and you soon come to something astonishing: a valley of dogs. Across perhaps half a mile […]

Not many authors publish a book at the age of 90, and fewer still do so when they are already halfway through another book. Can there be more than one [...]

After three bloody years and countless deaths, parcelled out daily in the tolls of bombs and gunfights and the tallies of throats slit in the night, it can be hard [...]

It is a marvellous thing, the soya plant. It grows as a little bush, a couple of feet high, and as it ripens many pods form, each containing two or [...]

My friend Ed sold a book the other day--at Sotheby's in New York, for $23,000. Now he is promising to spend the money annoying the neighbours in the cause of [...]

Under the Weather: us and the elements Tom Fort Century, 320pp, £14.99 If, as Mark Twain said, everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it, is there [...]

J D Bernal: the sage of science Andrew Brown Oxford University Press, 562pp, £25 A couple of days after D-Day, the scientist J D Bernal, who had played an important [...]

When Tony Blair got to his feet in the Commons last month to brush off the latest question about the Deepcut deaths, he had some statistics handy. 'There has been [...]

Five years ago, the distinguished Oxford physicist and Manhattan Project veteran Sir Rudolf Peierls was accused, along with his wife Genia, of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union in [...]

Brian Cathcart argues that the British should stop congratulating themselves on their response to racism Towards the end of 1993 a conversation took place between two high-ranking officers in the [...]

Somewhere about the half-way mark in the Lawrence inquiry, during a break in proceedings, I found myself in conversation with a man from Scotland Yard. We were standing in the [...]

Brian Cathcart reminds us that there is still no clear proof as to who killed Stephen Lawrence It was easy to visualise this group, knives in hand, priming themselves to [...]

Lamentable performances in the witness box show up the Met's past failings, writes Brian Cathcart The higher you climb, the better the view. The Lawrence inquiry has worked its way [...]

A tip for London criminals who think the police may be watching them: put your feet up during the week and do all your villainy on Saturdays and Sundays. You [...]

One day in 1939 James Chadwick came across one of his doctoral students lying on the floor of the laboratory, his clothes neatly nailed to the boards so that he [...]

Ship sinks; 1,500 die. In the scale of human disasters it is big rather than huge, but when the ship is the Titanic you can forget about the scale; this [...]

The notion may not come easily to some New Statesman readers but we owe David Mellor a debt. When he spoke in 1989 of the press 'drinking in the last-chance [...]

Looking back, it is ironic that it should have been the Independent, now clinging on for life, that did so much to encourage the bloating of national newspapers. Twenty years [...]

You might think that Paul Dacre would be susceptible to delusions of grandeur. After all, his brilliantly crafted Daily Mail is feared by public figures of every kind, his front [...]

If ever you wanted proof that the news you read arrives through a white filter--that it is selected, reported, edited and interpreted by groups of people that are overwhelmingly white--then [...]

Before the shock of the financial crisis wears off, parliament should take a small share of the public cash being showered on the banks to fund a monument to September [...]

I am teaching some journalism history this term (an enterprise made much more practical and enjoyable by the arrival of the first digitised, online newspaper archives), and inevitably I have [...]