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2 months ago | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |George Monaghan |Megan Kenyon
“This book is about the relationship between carpets and power,” says Dorothy Armstrong, a historian of material culture. While the most sumptuous carpets have been made by weavers who were invariably anonymous, illiterate, poor, young and female, they have journeyed across the globe “in the slipstream of powerful warriors, colonists, missionaries, intellectuals, merchants and industrialists”.
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Dec 24, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | George Monaghan
December comes in, Richard Curtis comes on. And for that dizzy month, when you go out into the world, you are able to believe that, twinkling in the lights over streets, “love actually is all around”. It feels wonderful, and you vow to treasure this knowledge in the year ahead. But the resolution is hard to keep – you might even have made it last year too. To hold on to the wisdom of Love Actually or About Time we must understand it: what does Richard Curtis know – and how did he learn it?
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Nov 23, 2024 | 
saturdayread.substack.com | Jason Cowley |Nicholas Harris |George Monaghan |Pippa Bailey
Good morning. Welcome to the Saturday Read, the New Statesman’s guide to politics, culture, books, and ideas. This is Finn, together with Nicholas, Pippa and George. We would like to thank all of our new subscribers for joining us in recent weeks. It’s the end of an era at the the New Statesman: our editor-in-chief Jason Cowley has announced he is standing down after 16 years in post.
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Nov 16, 2024 | 
saturdayread.substack.com | Jason Cowley |Nicholas Harris |George Monaghan
Good morning. Welcome to the Saturday Read, the New Statesman’s guide to politics, culture, books, and ideas. This is Jason, together with Finn, Nicholas, Pippa and George. Reading my colleague Nick Harris’s fine profile of Samantha Harvey, whose novel Orbital this week won the 2024 Booker Prize, I began to think about my own experiences as a Booker judge in an era when the contemporary literary novel seemed central to the culture rather than merely peripheral to it, as it is today.
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Nov 7, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |George Monaghan |Zuzanna Lachendro |Zoe Huxford
A Short History of British Architecture: From Stonehenge to the Shard by Simon JenkinsIn Britain, says the journalist and architectural buff Simon Jenkins, buildings have always been a battleground, where styles have grappled one against one or in a free-for-all: classicism vs gothic vs baroque vs modernism. If building is about structure, then architecture, he says, is about “how we choose to clothe that structure with meaning or delight”.
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Oct 11, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | George Monaghan
In his first Commons statement as our prime minister, Boris Johnson said that in 2050 “I fully intend to be around, though not necessarily in this job.” Not necessarily. The media round to promote his new memoir, Unleashed, has been similarly playful about return to Downing Street.
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Pippa Bailey |George Monaghan |Michael Prodger |Finn McRedmond
Immaculate Forms: Uncovering the History of Women’s Bodies by Helen KingIn 1916 William Blair-Bell, co-founder of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, asked in The Sex Complex: “What is a woman, and why is she not a man?” The answer to the question remains fiercely contested today; Keir Starmer’s apparent inability to answer it has generated many column inches.
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Sep 18, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |Zuzanna Lachendro |Nick Harris |George Monaghan
Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China by Jack WeatherfordBy the end of the 13th century, the Mongols ruled the largest empire in history, stretching from China to eastern Europe. The man largely responsible was Genghis Khan but it was his grandson, Kublai Khan, who matched these land gains by ones at sea. He turned a polity that originated in nomadic tribes from landlocked central Asia into an unparalleled maritime superpower.
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Sep 6, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | George Monaghan
A great American novel on a great British stage. The Grapes of Wrath is currently on at the National Theatre, and not for the first time: the same Frank Galati adaptation of John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel was shown on the same Lyttleton stage in 1989. Now Carrie Cracknell directs a cast starring Tony winner Cherry Jones (Succession) and Harry Treadaway (The Chemistry of Death). Jones and Treadaway are Ma and Tom, the matriarch of the Joad family and its bravest son.
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Aug 28, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |Pippa Bailey |George Monaghan
History in Flames by Robert BartlettIn 48BC, when Julius Caesar inadvertently burned down the great Library of Alexandria, the flames took with them an irreplaceable store of knowledge about the ancient world. We will never know just what it is we will never know. Since our understanding of the past is almost exclusively reliant on paper, says the historian Robert Bartlett, it is a wonder so much has survived.
