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.

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Battling the bullshitters

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

We should hail the cab-rank rule • The principle that barristers should accept any brief is all too easily sidestepped

Woman About Town

PESTON’S INBOX

Time to bite the crypto-bullet? • Compared to Rachel Reeves’s dubious record, Bitcoin looks like a storm-proof harbour

The Critic Profile Ed Miliband • The green zealotry of the energy secretary remains undimmed and some Labour insiders are concerned

Bingham’s failed revolution • Why the supposed “rule of law” now protects the offender rather than the law-abiding citizen

The slow, inexorable death of television news • Traditional broadcasters find themselves adrift in a radically different twenty-first century with little influence or control

How the press has changed, and how it remains the same • As the Fleet Street old guard of the broadsheets and red tops fade into irrelevence, a new, faster and less deferential media is springing up to replace it

The clock ticks ever louder • The Tory excuse of wait-and-see on the performance of their leader is already wearing thin

Speak softly and carry a big stick • A prudent fear of the unpredictability of war has been the touchstone of thinkers of the realist school, from Ancient Greece through China, India and Renaissance Florence to the present day

How to botch a war despite being handed it on a plate

TITANIA McGR ATH’S WOKE WORLD

OXFORD ON THE SPECTRUM • Jo Bartosch asks why so many bright undergraduates claim to be “neurodiverse”

How to get ahead in academia

How I became an art collector • Former arts minister Stephen Parkinson on his unlikely passion for the East London Group

Faith and free speech • The law on blasphemy is toxic. It protects free speech — until you provoke others to use force

A memorial fit for a queen • Stephen Bayley wonders if we will ever have …

Yes, beauty matters — now what? • How do we address our current artistic crisis and the wearying stalemate of the “culture wars”?

EVERYDAY LIES WITH THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Linden Green • Reverential nature writer

THE CITY THAT FORGOT ITSELF • Iason Athanasiadis traces the tortured twentieth-century history of the once cosmopolitan but now very Greek city of Thessaloniki

The growth imperative • The best way to win back voters is to make them richer by boosting the economy

Knut Hamsun: a novelist, a Nobel Prize winner and a Nazi supporter. Richard Holledge asks which of those three facts is the most important

Adam Dant on …

STUDIO • In Dialogue: Hasso Plattner Collection: Art from the GDR

Standing side by side with angels

Mercurial master of magic and misery

Priests moving in mysterious ways

Walking the wild side of Merrie England

Called to the bars

Treading the path of enlightenment

Anatomy of a British screen classic

Thoughts on a crisis

The regime that set the stage for Nazism

Publishing’s heyday

Snapshots of a strong and silent type

The long-gone queens of Grub St • In the good old days, powerful publicity directors could guarantee coverage for books

Romeo Coates “Between you and me …”

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