The New Statesman

The Conservatives are back - but what took them so long? Why did the world's most successful political party dump Margaret Thatcher only to commit electoral suicide under John Major? Just as importantly, what stopped the Tories getting their act together until David Cameron came along? The answers are as intriguing as the questions.

'Remarkable' Robert Macfarlane 'Gorgeous' Amy Liptrot 'Urgent and nourishing' Jessica J. Lee Nina Mingya Powles first learned to swim in Borneo – where her mother was born and her grandfather studied freshwater fish. There, the local swimming pool became her first body of water. Through her life there have been others that have meant different things, but have still been, in their own way, home: from the wild coastline of New Zealand to a pond in northwest London. In lyrical, powerful prose, Small Bodies of Water weaves together memories, dreams and nature writing. Exploring everything from migration, food, family, earthquakes and the ancient lunisolar calendar, Nina reflects on a girlhood spent growing up between two cultures, and what it means to belong.

Fiction of the New Statesman is the first study of the short stories published in the renowned British journal theNew Statesman. This book argues that New Statesman fiction advances a strong realist preoccupation with ordinary, everyday life, and shows how British domestic concerns have a strong hold on the working-class and lower-middle-class imaginative output of this period.

For the rest of the decade deputy editors Mostyn Lloyd and G. D. H. Cole struggled to combine academic careers with re-establishing the discredited New Statesman as the voice of the left. Success was to come only under the leadership and inspiration of a new editor, Kingsley Martin, and a new chairman, John Maynard Keynes, following the paper's symbolic take-over in 1930 of the Liberal weekly, the Nation.

In a period when Western military engagement has unleashed violent sectarianism global terrorism, and become a catalyst for the biggest exodus of migrants since the Second World War, the 1999 Nato intervention in Kosovo remains a unique and shining example of a process that led to a peaceful transition from vicious ethnic war to modern democracy. Less than twenty years ago, a young ethnic Albanian student leader called Hashim Thaçi, led a revolution against Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian tyrant with the biggest military force in Europe, and convinced the West to bomb Belgrade out of Kosovo. The aerial bombardment beckoned a period of unrivalled peace in the Balkans which Western leaders who sought to subsequently overturn other tyrannies in foreign lands would view with envy as a rare successful model. Nato intervention in Kosovo, led by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, resulted in democracy and the rule of law. By contrast, however, attempts by George W. Bush to effect regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by America, Britain and France to do the same in Libya, have left lethal power vacuums filled by Islamist insurgents, and brought about the downfall of Western leaders themselves. This book is the story of the rare success of Western military intervention and the first biography of the new President of Kosovo, the youngest country in Europe.

No British periodical or weekly magazine has a richer and more distinguished archive than The New Statesman, which has long been at the centre of British political and cultural life. Some astonishing things were first published in its pages: great poems such as W.B. Yeats' "Easter 1916"and Edward Thomas's "Adlestrop"; H.G. Wells' interview with Stalin in 1934; C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" essay; Christopher Hitchens' final interview, conducted by Richard Dawkins; and Hugh Grant's "The bugger bugged". Most of the great political and cultural writers of the recent past have written for The New Statesman. Many have been on its staff or were associates of it: George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, V.S. Pritchett, Paul Johnson and John Gray. The most significant intellectual and cultural currents of the age ripple through its pages. Many of the radical causes of our times were launched in association with or in the pages of The New Statesman. For example, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and Charter 88. There is, too, a rich history of illustration and cartoons to draw on, from Low's sketches of the great and the good to the gonzo art of Ralph Steadman and Will Self's early comic strips. The book is more than an anthology. It tells the story of the New Statesman, from the eve of the First World War to the long aftermath of 9/11 and the Great Recession through which we are still passing. It looks forward as well as back, offering a unique and unpredictable perspective on the world.

'A beautiful piece of storytelling – the British eyed from unexpected places, from China to the middle of the middle of the middle. The question will never go away but these answers help us a lot.' Andrew Marr 'As someone who zips around England — and the wider UK every week — this book really resonates with me. Wonderfully written with colourful and incisive accounts of contemporary England.' Chris Mason, Presenter of BBC Radio 4's Any Questions? In this compelling and essential book, Jason Cowley, editor-in-chief of the New Statesman, examines contemporary England through a handful of the key news stories from recent times to reveal what they tell us about the state of the nation and to answer the question Who Are We Now? Spanning the years since the election of Tony Blair’s New Labour government to the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, the book investigates how England has changed and how those changes have affected us. Cowley weaves together the seemingly disparate stories of the Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay, the East End Imam who was tested during a summer of terror, the pensioner who campaigned against the closure of her GP’s surgery and Gareth Southgate’s transformation of English football culture. And in doing so, Cowley shows the common threads that unite them, whether it is attitudes to class, nation, identity, belonging, immigration, or religion. He also examines the so-called Brexit murder in Harlow, the haunting repatriation of the fallen in the Iraq and Afghan wars through Wootton Bassett, the Lancashire woman who took on Gordon Brown, and the flight of the Bethnal Green girls to Islamic State, fleshing out the headlines with the very human stories behind them. Through these vivid and often moving stories, Cowley offers a clear and compassionate analysis of how and why England became so divided and the United Kingdom so fragmented, and how we got to this cultural and political crossroads. Most importantly, he also shows us the many ways in which there is genuine hope for the future.

Over Britain’s first century of mass democracy, politics has lurched from crisis to crisis. How does this history of political agony illuminate our current age of upheaval? To find out, journalist Phil Tinline takes us back to two past eras when the ruling consensus broke down, and the future filled with ominous possibilities – until, finally, a new settlement was born. How did the Great Depression’s spectres of fascism, bombing and mass unemployment force politicians to think the unthinkable, and pave the way to post-war Britain? How was Thatcher’s road to victory made possible by a decade of nightmares: of hyperinflation, military coups and communist dictatorship? And why, since the Crash in 2008, have new political threats and divisions forced us to change course once again? Tinline brings to life those times, past and present, when the great compromise holding democracy together has come apart; when the political class has been forced to make a choice of nightmares. This lively, original account of panic and chaos reveals how apparent catastrophes can clear the path to a new era. The Death of Consensus will make you see British democracy differently.