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.

WHAT LAW? WHAT ORDER?

The Critic

SUMMER SALE 3 ISSUES FOR £3!

Sorry is the hardest word • Ruth Hunt laughably describes herself now as “someone who has always been working in the middle ground, trying to build consensus”

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

What price justice? • Small disputes involving ordinary people are not a waste of the courts’ time

Woman About Town

NOVA’S DIARY

Chasing rainbows • Dissident civil servants have been risking their careers to fight a losing battle against burgeoning Whitehall wokery and the situation will only worsen under a Labour government

EVERYDAY LIES WITH THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Was she more than pie in the sky? • We all laughed at the former PM but her radical message might have been right

THE END OF HIGH QUALITY HOMES • Michael Gove’s new leasehold reforms risk derailing the economic engine that helped finance some of Britain’s finest suburbs

The love that can’t be erased • A recent court case exposed the surrogacy industry’s big lie: that mothers don’t have feelings for the children they gave birth to

When breast isn’t best • A major maternity support group is at war with its trustees over its insistence that men should be enabled to breastfeed

WHY DID THE EYE LOOK AWAY? • Graham Linehan thought a title known for investigative journalism would be concerned by a series of trans scandals

Please remember: terrorism is evil • Worrying numbers of people romanticise the brutality of those perceived as “oppressed”

Iain Banks: a double life • John Self recalls the brilliant but wayward talent of a novelist who wrote both literary and science fiction and whose disturbing debut, The Wasp Factory, is being reissued this year

The odd couple • Jeffrey Meyers says the novelists Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene may have been unlike in politics, religion and personality, but they remained the closest of friends for four decades

Medical science is oppressive

Rosemary Sutcliff • A writer of genius capable of conveying the feelings and lives of those who lived in the distant past

Lettuce be, Liz • Liz Truss’s account of her woeful reign is packed with disingenuity and conceit

The first futurist • Jeremy Black argues there is more to Daniel Defoe than Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe. He was a prescient thinker consumed by individual redemption and social improvement

Harriet Pester Bookworld PR

Did QE cost taxpayers? • Claims that the Bank of England’s programme cost billions are a red herring

The best we can hope for • Daniel Kahneman, who died this year, was a brilliant psychologist who argued that being irrational was …

The National Trust should act its age • Calvin Po visits the “Children’s Country House at Sudbury” and despairs at our main heritage conservation charity’s efforts to be down with the kids

STUDIO • The Venice Art Biennale

Adam Dant on …

Brexit: a portrait of political paralysis

Making a miserable meal of mythbusting

Here be flagons

Anarchy in the UK

The whores and mores of Hanoverian London

Burmese days: for good and ill

Slaying gay culture

The secret war of a wolf in chic clothing

Ulster’s deadly web

A labour of love

Godfather of the Reformation

The beginning and end of conversation

Can jokes in terrible taste ever be funny?

Beyond the...