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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 [...]

Stephen Lawrence, a black eighteen-year-old, was murdered in a London suburb in 1993 by several white assailants. Lawrence was beaten and stabbed while waiting for a bus. Five young men were arrested and two were charged, but the case did not come to court despite three police investigations. Lawrence's family began a private prosecution but it was dismissed due to the judge characterizing the chief witness as unreliable. The inquest into Lawrence's death found the five white men responsible, but this was not a guilty verdict. Courts continue to suffer from racism.

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 [...]

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 [...]

As I flicked back through my notebook, my eye fell on the words 'TORIES IN TURMOIL'. The Daily Mirror, Guardian and Daily Telegraph were all saying it. Reading on, I [...]

Among the many consequences of Barry George's acquittal, there is one that has been neglected: this remarkable event poses a direct challenge to the government's policy of refusing to enforce [...]

when was the last time a visiting dignitary caused such excitement? When did we last see our leaders, coiffed and groomed, rehearsing their most beatific grins in preparation for a [...]

Reading that the News of the World believed its quarrel with Max Mosley raised issues of freedom of speech put me in mind of those footballers who, when brushed on [...]

The Daily Mail brought news of Victor Abrahams, a property manager aged 67 who was served with a £100 penalty ticket for parking his car in a side street in [...]

The final words of the Sunday Telegraph's coverage of the gay Anglican 'wedding' caught my eye. 'A champagne reception was held in the Great Hall of St Bartholomew's Hospital ... [...]

After the 97th British soldier died in Afghanistan--Dale Gostick, aged 22, from Oxford, killed by a roadside mine in Helmand province on 25 May--thoughts began to turn to a rounder [...]

Cast your mind back to the summer of 2005, to the days following the London Tube and bus bombings, and remember the shock that was felt at the discovery that [...]

If you had said in early March that the Jersey child abuse investigation would slip out of the headlines within a few weeks without any big new discoveries or significant [...]

The following are notes for a possible university lecture in a course to be called 'Techniques/or Reporting Every Eventuality'. Good morning, everyone. Dr Johnson once wrote that 'when two Englishmen [...]

You would think they'd be happy. For the first time in 16 years, their party does well in an election, capturing hundreds of council seats across England and Wales and [...]

After the Vietnam War, the BBC's Robin Day is said to have remarked: 'One wonders if in future a democracy which has uninhibited television coverage in every home will ever [...]

If by chance you have been reading the popular papers in recent days--in particular the News of the World, the Sunday Mirror, the Sun and the Sunday Express--then you will [...]

The Daily Mail is not a paper to endorse protest lightly. Generally, it regards the protesting mindset as whingeing and irresponsible and it holds in contempt the lifestyles of what [...]

It was in many ways the perfect journalistic storm. We like any bad news, but some kinds of bad news are better to wallow in than others, and the opening [...]