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.

NOT UNIVERSITY MATERIAL

The Critic

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The will to power • It doesn’t just promise that good outcomes are possible without effort or sacrifice, but that mutually incompatible outcomes can be achieved together

Letters • Write to The Critic by email at letters@thecritic.co.uk including your address and telephone number

A hollow “decolonisation” • Chagossian exiles in Crawley are not cheering the annexation of their homeland by Mauritius

Woman About Town

PESTON’S INBOX

Why bankers are earthly saints • Fiction and drama are filled with unhappy financiers, but the real world is very different

Victim or cold, heartless murderer? • The conviction of nurse Lucy Letby has become a cause célèbre, but the claims of many who protest her innocence do not stand up to scrutiny

City of the future • Birmingham was once an economic powerhouse with a proud civic identity. Today, with a bankrupt council, rubbish rotting in the streets and toxic sectarian politics, it is at the forefront of a battle for the new England

South African doom loop? • Britain’s once-secure scaffolding of state is buckling. Is the nation heading for a …

MASTERS OF THE DIGITAL BATTLEFIELD • Operation Spider’s Web, in which dozens of Russian bombers were destroyed with drones, shows Ukraine’s aptitude for blue-sky thinking. It marks an inflection point in warfare

Make every day a Pride Day • TITANIA McGR ATH’S WOKE WORLD

Why you should believe in Mrs B • Daniel Johnson defends the Conservative leader

Balancing the books • Henry Jeffreys tells of his experience with Unbound, the publisher that promised a new way of doing business but left many authors unpaid

The Critic Profile Colin MacInnes • Bourgeois chronicler of multicultural London who tended to deify black foreigners and demonise native whites

Christianity cannot be virtual • Church should be where you put aside your iPhone and reconnect to the physical world

Striving for the divine • Bijan Omrani on George Herbert, a poet the Church of England should celebrate

A question of character • DJ Taylor has been fascinated since boyhood by the strange assortment of Norwich characters. Now he fears he is becoming one himself…

How AI is making us more stupid

On His Majesty’s Service • The appointment of lord-lieutenants is a very discreet — and very English — affair

Diana Lampwick Dutiful daughter

TOP TRUMPS: CAMBRIDGE EDITION • The Critic takes the measure of the glittering candidates for the Cambridge Chancellorship

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Plus ça change: why France keeps rioting • Violent protest is nothing new for the French. It’s part of the nation’s eternal quest for Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

EVERYDAY LIES WITH THEODORE DALRYMPLE

STUDIO • The Venice Architecture Biennale

Adam Dant on …

Should we make Classics history?

Poet, artist, tantric Christian

The past in pictures

Brunelleschi’s egg

The dead hand of decolonisation

Allies and enemies

Beating the retreat

Trapped in an identity crisis

Making the best of what we have

Striving for peak perseverance

Why GDP is no longer FFP (fit for purpose)

Pretty as peacocks

Keyboard warrior

The art of twisting and turning

A crisis of sex and money • Publishing needs a shake-up: its economic model is broken while male authors are shunned

Romeo...