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.

NO HAPPY ENDINGS

The Critic

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The morality of altruism • People have a limitless capacity to convince themselves that what’s right coincides with what’s best for them

Letters

The deep wisdom of rootedness • Society has lost touch with the people and places who helped to shape it in the first place

Woman About Town

NOVA’S DIARY

WHY THE INTELLECTUAL DARK WEB HAS FAILED • Unlike their neoconservative forebears, the internet ideologues of the IDW have yet to formulate a coherent vision and lack the political nous to turn their ideas into action

The City lights are dimming • Why the Square Mile is increasingly at risk of becoming an irrelevance

Bring back the Law Lords • Tony Blair’s introduction of a US-style Supreme Court is based on a misreading of the British constitution and has served to undermine the supremacy of Parliament

Conscious decoupling • Some people consider ideas on their own terms; for others they are inextricable from context

THE PAPER TIGER AND THE RUSSIAN BEAR • NATO’s naive and supine reponse will not drive Putin’s army from Ukraine and emboldens Moscow still further, says Patrick Mercer

HOW THE UKRAINE DELUSION COULD END • Biden might entertain peace to cut his losses and boost his election chances, by Curt Mills

SEND THE TOOLS TO FINISH THE JOB • It is imperative that the West once again becomes “the great arsenal of democracy”, by Daniel Johnson

Tough justice • Legislation to resolve the Post Office scandal is not as straightforward as it seems

Rape is wrong-let’s at least agree on that • Victoria Smith argues that fundamental feminist theories are under attack from within feminism itself

PREACHING TO AN EVER-DWINDLING CHOIR • Once seen as the default denomination of presidents, tycoons and the WASP elite, America’s Episcopal Church is struggling in the era of Trump, New Age thinking and TV evangelism

“Plagiarism”: a racist weapon

Salvador Allende • Lionised by the Left, the Chilean president refused to moderate his Marxist aims in the face of economic chaos.

Godfather of British geopolitics • Mackinder at 120: How the revolutionary global thinking of an Edwardian academic continues to shape attitudes today

THE END OF PEVSNER • The monumental work of maintaining a live record of the architecture of the UK and Ireland is in danger of being abandoned

How the internet killed The Simpsons • Nicholas Clairmont has avidly viewed more than 750 episodes of the comedy about the residents of Springfield — but won’t be watching any more

Jamie Tradescant Highbrow Sports Journalist

Saving my own bacon • Only the particularly pig-headed will stick it out in the pork farming business

THE SPECTRE OF THE PAST • The “Great English Ghost Story” offers a form of comfort and is rooted in the ache of nostalgia for a more elegant era

Adam Dant on …

STUDIO • Caspar David Friedrich

The false prophets of war and turmoil

Recasting the Crown for modern Britain

There is a lushness to this expanded Letters

Four women seers in a time of strife

Postcards from before the war

Turning a blind eye to a tilted playing field

Taking on the right-on with cold, hard facts

Giants and pygmies

Learning in the round

Fifth magician blues

Rugby’s debt to Mrs T

You can’t judge a book by its cover

Where has all the money gone?...