John Tavener: sacred music for a secular world
Why does the secular mind seek out the sacred, often at moments of heightened stress or torment?
February 14 2024 / The New Statesman
Tennis: the end of a Golden Era
The era of the Big Four - Federer, Nadal, Novak and Murray - is ending. What comes next? And will tennis sell out to Saudi Arabia?
July 2 2023 / The Sunday Times
Wootton Bassett: The Town that Wept
Mourning the fallen soldiers of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
March 16 2023 / The New Statesman
The Last Man: Surviving the Morecambe Bay Tragedy
The parable of the Chinese cocklepickers
March 19 2022 / The Times
John le Carré: The Secret Life
In the end, the great spy novelist remained an enigma even to himself.
December 12 2020 / Salt Publishing (republished New Statesman)
George Orwell: The Road to Revolution
Orwell wrote Animal Farm at a time of global crisis as a warning about oppressive state power. Its message is as relevant as ever, says the New Statesman editor in a new introduction to the seminal book.
December 4 2020 / Macmillan Publishers
Political Football
Marcus Rashford, Raheem Sterling and the rise of the activist super-player
June 24 2020 / New Statesman
A Summer Without Cricket
The silence of a Covid summer
June 6 2020 / New Statesman
Covid-19 and Mortality Salience
The possibility of post-traumatic growth
April 29 2020 / New Statesman
Letter from Sandhurst: Mission Command
Can you teach the art of leadership?
February 2020 / New Statesman
The English Question
If Brexit is an English revolt what will happen to England after Brexit?
November 27 2019 / New Statesman
Mark Hollis: The Sound of Silence
A musician of extraordinary depths
February 27 2019 / New Statesman
VS Naipaul: The king of literary rootlessness
Not since Conrad had a novelist so completely absorbed himself in the shifting complexities of his age, or written more sharply about the dark places of the world.
August 13 2018 / New Statesman
England Rising: stretching the flag
How the World Cup and Gareth Southgate’s young, diverse team reawakened a sense of progressive English nationalism
July 4 2018 / New Statesman
New Town Blues
The three men had been drinking for several hours by the time they arrived at The Stow shopping centre in Harlow. It was approaching midnight on a warm bank holiday weekend towards the end of August. What happened next would reverberate around the world ...
April 1 2018 / Granta
The Lost Boy
Richard Beard seeks to uncover the truth behind a long-ago family tragedy
May 11 2017 / New Statesman
The fall of the golden generation
What happened to the best and the brightest of New Labour?
September 15 2016 / New Statesman
AE Housman: Nostalgia and the spirit of England
The dominant tone of English discourse is one of regret
August 20 2016 / Financial Times
The rise of the new young fogeys
Was it more fun being young in the 1980s?
June 13 2016 / The Times
The spy who became John le Carré
The private anguish, and public success of David Cornwell.
October 31 2015 / The Financial Times
The battle for the soul of Essex Man
If Labour are ever again to win an absolute majority, it must start by winning back working-class voters in constituencies like Harlow.
April 30 2015 / New Statesman
George Orwell's luminous truths
The English writer is revealed in all his fierce integrity in a new collection of journalism.
December 6 2014 / Financial Times
Letter from Edinburgh: the Untied Kingdom
The final days of the Scottish referendum campaign
September 13 2014 / New Statesman
Lost Promise: the short, brilliant life of Marina Keegan
As a student, her urgent writing about her generation had already reached a wider audience. Her death, days after graduation, lends her words extra power.
June 20 2014 / Financial Times
Eton eternal: How one school came to dominate public life
New Statesman editor Jason Cowley speaks to Anthony Little, headmaster of Eton College, about the role of public schools, the new crop of Etonians ruling public life and Gove’s education reforms.
May 8 2013 / New Statesman
The Long Shadow of George Orwell
We are missing a British writer to whom we can turn and learn from at moments of national consequence or crisis
April 19 2013 / Financial Times
Letter from Israel: The endless war
Reporting from Tel Aviv and Ramallah as the latest rash of violence began to sweep Israel, Jason Cowley finds a nation implacably set on a course of war . . . and increasingly disconnected from the world.
November 22 2012 / New Statesman
Letter from Harlow: Reaching for utopia
After the war, Harlow was supposed to offer east Londoners the chance of a fresh start and a stab at the good life. This month, it became the place where a suspicious fire killed six members of a Muslim family.
October 25 2012 / New Statesman
What does David Cameron want?
The Prime Minister’s lack of originality.
July 4 2012 / New Statesman
States of play
American novelists have never been afraid to tackle sport. But will British authors ever take it seriously?
January 21 2012 / Financial Times
Christopher Hitchens: Never giving ground
The editor of the New Statesman reflects on the life and legacy of the great contrarian
January 2 2012 / New Statesman
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: An elegy for England
John le Carré’s classic novel, now adapted for the big screen, is much more than a cold war whodunnit.
September 22 2011 / New Statesman
How good is Martin Amis?
Male rivalry – especially between writers – is a recurrent theme in Amis’s fiction.
April 2011 / From The Good of the Novel, Faber & Faber
Who Owns Britain?
There was a time, in the days of Lloyd George and then Attlee, when land reform was a convulsive policy. It should be again
October 19 2010 / New Statesman
The Tragic Defiance of Gordon Brown
The Labour Prime Minister seems trapped - and lost
June 11 2009 / New Statesman
1989 The year of the crowd
New Statesman editor Jason Cowley introduces a special issue on the year that saw the Berlin Wall come down.
March 12 2009 / New Statesman
Letter from Dubai: the infinite city
Dubai wants to be the ultimate sporting city in the Arabian desert
May 4 2008 / The Observer
Charles Hills: sadness and loss in the shadowlands
CAR Hills was well known on the London literary scene. He was a magazine editor and short story writer who dreamed of publishing glory but could not escape a troubled life. But what drove him to the brink of murder?
February 3 2008 / The Observer
Cormac McCarthy: the late style
The brutal, beautiful fictions of an American master
January 12 2008 / The Guardian
David Sylvian: Music and Silence
The singer-songwriter’s journey from early pop stardom to the avant-garde is one of the most intriguing in contemporary music
September 2007 / The World is Everything tour brochure
The Blair Delusion: the politics of excitement
The Blair decade began with an exuberant rush of energy and sense of possibility. How can politics recapture the ability to inspire us?
May 14 2007 / New Statesman
Things Fall Apart: representations of war in Africa
Brutalised and war-ravaged, the child soldiers of Sierra Leone and Sudan are symbols of a broken order
April 29 2007 / The Observer
Glittering Prizes
We live in an age of cultural inflation
October 22 2006 / The Observer
Fiction after 9/11
Authors are ideally placed to give us a true view of terrorism
August 13 2006 / The Observer
Letter from Dresden: here in the east, the World Cup feels distant
Dresden was not chosen to host a single World Cup game, even though the stated intention of the organising committee, at least when it was bidding for the World Cup, was to incorporate the east so that it became a tournament for the whole country.
June 25 2006 / The Observer
The Cup that rules the world
It unites continents, is watched by billions and its stars are treated as living gods. No contest can touch it for suspense or despair. Jason Cowley celebrates sport’s premier competition.
June 11 2006 / The Observer
Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos: the novel that has scandalised and seduced generations
The many incarnations of Les Liaisons Dangereuses
July 16 2005 / The Guardian
Rwanda: 10 Years Later
Cultural representations and the legacy of the genocide
February 27 2005 / The Observer
Childhood stories: what I used to read and why
The lost world of the boys’ weeklies
August 23 2004 / New Statesman
Letter from Rwanda: after the killings
The perpetrators of genocide are neither abused nor shunned. But pink shirts mark out the killers
April 19 2004 / New Statesman
The Long Twilight of New Labour
Tony Blair embraced multiculturalism, open borders and the new market-driven globalisation. But how has the country changed since 1997?
March 29 2004 / New Statesman
The Age of Anxiety
Visions of apocalypse, once confined to science fiction, now dominate mainstream films and novels.
July 21 2003 / New Statesman
Letter from Iceland: imaginary landscapes
Europe’s nearest approximation to a classless society, but what secrets lurk in the dark?
December 16 2002 / New Statesman
The Search for Dr Bloch
Dr Bloch had an interesting story to tell. He had known Hitler at first hand; nearly forty years before he had been the Hitler family’s doctor.
October 1 2002 / Granta, 79
France: into the void
Those who voted for Le Pen belong to a generation which, in the words of one writer, “knows that pleasure is the opposite of happiness”. Jason Cowley on a nation’s cultural emptiness.
June 5 2002 / New Statesman
Letter from Berlin: Germany's forgotten victims
A nation reckons with its past: who remembers the two million Germans who died after the war ended?
March 27 2002 / The Guardian
Forward, to the union of humanity
Interpreting the US terrorist attacks through Immanuel Kant, Francis Fukuyama and Tony Blair.
October 15 2001 / New Statesman
Philip Roth: The Will to Power
No writer had been more adept at exploiting postmodern ideas of the instability of the self and the slippage between autobiography and fiction, but this time it seemed as though Roth had reached a terminus, the point at which his stylised self-obsession had become a poetics of despair.
July 2001 / Atlantic Monthly; Prospect, Issue 65
Letter from Cyprus: The view beyond the Green Line
A country of deep divisions
March 11 2001 / The Independent
The March of Labour Halted: the post-war consensus unravels
In 1977, the forces of the New Right and punk rock were agitating to transform Britain
October 30 2000 / New Statesman
Letter from Glasgow: Sectarian hatred and the Old Firm
It used to be said that if you wanted to discover someone’s religion in Glasgow, you simply asked which football team they supported
August 27 2000 / The Independent
Letter from Trieste: the city between empires
There is something mysterious about the cosmopolitan Adriatic port, a certain kind of vivid ghostliness
June 25 2000 / The Independent
Letter from Scandinavia: The bridge over troubled water
The new Oresund bridge uniting Sweden and Denmark is an icon of science and modernity - and a powerful symbol of the onward march to a borderless Europe
January 31 2000 / New Statesman
Moscow Notebook: the post-Soviet crack-up
Into the lower depths of the city
January 1 1999 / New Statesman
Was the pity all in the poetry?
The Great War lives on vividly in poems now the 80th anniversary of the armistice has triggered a new publishing boom. But do books bring us closer to the truth, asks Jason Cowley.
November 8 1998 / The Sunday Times
When will Russia find a new Tolstoy?
The Russian Booker Prize has galvanised writers to produce controversial winners. Jason Cowley reports.
December 11 1997 / The Times
Journey to the end of the night
Francis Stuart, one of Ireland’s finest living writers, spent the last war in Berlin writing scripts for Lord Haw Haw. Jason Cowley visits the 94 year old writer in his Dublin bungalow and considers the relationship between great art and brutal politics in the lives of Stuart, Céline and Knut Hamsun.