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.

CRISIS OF LEADERSHIP

The Critic

THE PERFECT CHRISTMAS GIFT

The party that fell for a lie

Letters

An artist at the assizes • Cyril Hare was that rara avis: a circuit judge who could write like an angel

Woman About Town

PESTON’S INBOX

When real Rivals fought over TV • The hit adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s novel reflects the ITV franchise battles

Don’t appeal to our worst instincts • How many will talk themselves into asking for a parent’s early death if money is involved?

How the right went wrong

Max Grubb Resentful Academic

LIBERAL MYTHS OF THE “GOOD OLD WAYS” • Patrick Porter says Donald Trump’s foreign policy is not so very different from the Democrats’ imagined golden age of American leadership

Subscribe to save the BBC • David Elstein proposes a radical new solution to the problem of the BBC’s outmoded licence fee that could ensure more high-quality programming

SCRUTON AND THE ROOTS OF MODERN CONSERVATISM • Roger Scruton’s intellectual journey from Peterhouse, Cambridge, to a London college full of left-wing firebrands, from sophisticated intellectual soirées in Holland Park to a “bohemian blur” in Essex and a squalid Fleet Street pub

So many voters got it wrong

Writing lives • Writing Lives: From Victorian glorification to Bloomsbury boldness to contemporary obliquity, the life story of the biography is chronicled by D.J. Taylor

The brilliance of Paul Bailey • Enjoy some old Baileys: few literary activities could give quite so much pleasure as reading the work of this brilliant but overlooked novelist, suggests John Self

The Bard at Christmas • The Bard at Christmas: It is impossible to appreciate Shakespeare fully without acknowledging his Christian foundations, says Jaspreet Singh Boparai

How the Navy made Britain • Culmination of a magisterial work that entwines the story of the Royal Navy with the scientific, cultural and social history of our nation

Knights errant of the road • Once one of London’s most distinctive tribes, cycle messengers are a dying breed

William Warham • A champion of the English Church unfairly eclipsed by his great rivals Wolsey, Cranmer and Cromwell

IN SEARCH OF FORGOTTEN HEROES • The Church has consigned to oblivion those who risked all to end the slave trade

An abuser hiding in plain sight • There was shock when a feted theatre director turned out to be a paedophile who collected child rape porn but were the clues there all along?

EVERYDAY LIES WITH THEODORE DALRYMPLE

It’s the money supply, stupid • How the Keynsian blinkers of Democrat economists led to a second Trump victory

STUDIO • Medieval treasures of Germany

Adam Dant on …

The definitive Brexit book — for now

Getting the measure of the Russian bear

A tumultuous decade of ingenious novelties

A worthy but deeply flawed attack on woke

Eventful afterlife of a visionary genius

Clickbait criticism

Booty contest

Land of fireandblood

The generation game

The joy of old English

Too many silences in this book about music

The blessings on our doorsteps

Finding faith

Heroes, villains and lessons in life

Libyans, Parisians and London Irish

The golden age of criticism? • There are good reasons why serious writers no longer review in the national press

Romeo Coates “Between you and me …” • WHILE THE FELLOW PRESENTLY residing in Number 10 shows...