The Critic

The Critic is Britain's new highbrow monthly current affairs magazine for politics, art and literature. Dedicated to rigorous content, first rate writing and unafraid to ask the questions others won't.

All sound and fury

The Critic

Women who play along …

The man who ended overreach • Lord Reed’s tenure as president of the Supreme Court has been admired by those of us who value the stability of the law

Woman About Town

PESTON’S INBOX

HOW PROGRESSIVISM HOBBLED THE POLICE • David Spencer says the Diversity, Equality and Inclusion agenda promised a fairer form of policing, but has delivered a weaker one that is less capable and has lost public trust

EVERYDAY LIES WITH THEODORE DALRYMPLE

The great American dream • Beware the lure of the vast US market. We should focus instead on opportunities closer to home

Asset-stripping on campus? • Selling universities to private companies risks destroying their charitable purpose

THE ABSOLUTE STATE OF THE NATION • Scotland has become a tinpot country in which incompetence — or worse — need be no hindrance to the careers of seemingly bulletproof leading establishment figures

Carry on matron • Sebastian Milbank argues that the crisis in nursing can be reversed by a return to Florence Nightingale’s vision of vocation and a rebuilt hierarchy on the wards

Vapid slogans for the hard of thinking

The Mexican baby business • Julie Bindel calls for the end of an exploitative trade

THE AMERICAN CHAOS MACHINE • Dominic Green argues that the United States’s current aggressive expansionism and domestic strife are not a Trump-era aberration, but an intrinsic part of its national character

TRUMP THE IMPRUDENT KING • The President has so far achieved the opposite of what he promised, multiplying problems at home and abroad rather than increasing peace and stability

An uneasy peace amid the ruins • Unlike most of the cities of Syria, the historic heart of the capital, Damascus, emerged largely unscathed from 14 years of brutal civil war. But amid ongoing sectarian strife, its 4 million citizens remain uncertain of what the future will bring

Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law • Punishing anyone before they have even been convicted of anything makes me uneasy

Gentrification? Better than deprivation • Once one of the dodgier areas of South London, the Elephant and Castle has been radically spruced up, but not everyone is happy about it

Miracle of the magical migrants • A man’s identity is fluid when he steps on British soil but calcified on African soil, the left believes

Allan Massie • The late Scottish critic, author and journalist whose historical and crime fiction deserves to be much more widely read, says Henry Jeffreys

Giles Treadwell Old-style literary agent

Gender self-ID was never the law • Heroine to some, heretic to others, barrister Akua Reindorf KC speaks about the controversial trans guidance the government is so loath to implement

The truth about Shakespeare

Adam Dant on …

STUDIO • Lost Railway Art

From Wigton to Wadham College

Too starstruck to see Marilyn’s faults

Unreadable red bile

Making the case for liberalism

Why nobody likes a smarty pants

The Arctic circle: a game of ice and fire

The online life that steals your soul

Is this the end of art?

The roots of hatred

Spirits, a seven-year-old and a death camp

Terry tackles literary lightweights • Is a distinguished professor right to hold intellectual biography in low esteem?

Romeo Coates “Between you and me …”

Mehta’s protest over the Gaza war

A show to make you afraid of the...