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 IS TORYISM FOR?

The Critic

Post-truth medicine

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

The new diversity bar • Is the Bar Standards Council really fit to enforce a proposed raft of new equality rules?

Woman About Town

SUE GRAY’S INBOX

Death by a thousand cuts • David Elstein says the near-invisibity of the Proms on BBC TV is a symptom of the collapse of public service broadcasting in Britain

Wanted: a real plan to reform the NHS • No serious party can sit out the ideological battle over the remorseless rise in public spending, including on health

Eric Fogey • Throwback

CALM DOWN, DEARS! • European liberals should stop panicking about a second Trump presidency. While not exactly your friend, Donald Trump offers no threat to Britain and Europe’s core ideological commitments and is unlikely to radically change U.S. foreign policy

When the music stopped • The closure of her university department led musicologist Alexandra Wilson to reflect on the inexorable decline of arts education and the rise of knee-jerk politics and managerialism

Mike Lynch should inspire us • The tragedy of the Bayesian highlights a wider issue about our lack of ambition

How the Tories can win again • Johnny Leavesley knows what the new leader of the Conservatives must do

In defence of hereditary peers • Starmer’s spiteful plan for the Lords breaks an important intergenerational contract

A real plan for growth • Jon Moynihan says a series of simple economic blunders has led to self-defeating policies of high immigration and a bloated public sector that strangle any chance of prosperity for all

Free speech is fascist

Don’t bet on green energy • Groupthink has blinded us into backing solar and wind. Will a big short make us see sense?

Bonfire of the verities

DON’T PLAY POLITICS WITH MOTHERHOOD • J.D. Vance’s jibe about “childless cat ladies” may have been a crass dogwhisle aimed at middle America, but in a sense he made a point that both Left and Right are keen to ignore: being a mother can change our perspectives and priorities

The Critic Profile Shiva Naipaul • The younger brother of a controversial Nobel Prize winner who has been unjustly overlooked

The future that never came • Nicholas Boys Smith describes how post-war London was saved from a modernist masterplan that would have seen millions of homes bulldozed for ring roads and high-rise estates

The real cost of public sector pay • Bumper pay rises for doctors and teachers are bound to result in higher inflation

Out of power for half a century • As the Conservatives face the prospect of a long spell in opposition, they must heed the lessons of their predecessors. In the eighteenth century, the Tories were divided, outmanoevred and …

EVERYDAY LIES WITH THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Farewell to Larry Siedentop • Patrick Nash bids a fond farewell to Larry Siedentop, the great political philosopher, Oxford don, and sage defender of Western liberalism

Adam Dant on …

STUDIO • Sean Scully in France

Much more than mere child’s play

Folly, fantasy and Britain’s defence crisis

The Bezos behemoth

Pornhub exposed

The right-on, leftwing oppressors

An intelligent book on AI? Very nearly

Rising above the mob

The age of reason, sliced and diced

A beguiling star who loved melodrama

Have we been barking up the wrong...