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.

Not the BBC News

The Critic

Hold the back page • Football was once a spectacle. The grotesque Qatar World Cup reminds us of all it has become

Miriam Elia on…

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

Missing the point on lockdown • A new book on civil liberties and the pandemic is bogged down by petty proceduralism

Woman About Town

NOVA’S DIARY

So how did it all go so wrong for Liz Truss? • The former prime minister was fundamentally right in her diagnosis of the situation at home and abroad and what should be done about it

How the Bank broke the Government • By letting a rickety asset class grow like topsy, the Bank of England created the crisis blamed on the mini-budget

Cornelia Engledow Neo-Brutalist

The roots of Conservatism

THE TRANS SHAMING OF A RAPE SURVIVOR • Victoria Smith on the shocking case of an assault victim denied life-saving surgery because she asked for single-sex facilities

EVERYDAY LIES WITH THEODORE DALRYMPLE

ODESA: THE BATTLE FOR A CITY’S SOUL • Putin’s war has only strengthened the Ukrainian identity of a port where many have turned against their own Russian language and want to tear down Moscow’s imperial monuments

THE BIG LIE: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE BBC’S BASHIR COVER-UP • Tom Mangold was a respected Panorama reporter until he and two others were pushed out for raising concerns about the deceitful way Martin Bashir had secured his notorious interview with Princess Diana. Now he reveals for the first time how the Corporation betrayed its founding principles to protect senior executives

A TALE OF BETRAYAL

The forgotten heroes of the Fourth Plinth • Alexander Chula admires a thoughtful artwork that highlights the complex history of anti-colonalism in Africa

UNLIKELY AUTEUR OF MERCY • Dan Hitchens makes the case for film director Shane Meadows as a genius of Christian art whose visceral works proselytize for forgiveness and make him an …

Elon Musk is worse than Hitler

HOW TO DRINK PORT WITHOUT THE STORM • Henry Jeffreys says there is nothing more agreeable than a glass or two of fine vintage port at Christmas. The problem is that port no longer agrees with him

Weighing up the real value of art • Should museums sell their least interesting works to finance Covid-hit art institutions and help fund a new generation of artists?

A mission to explain • Businesses must be more transparent if they are to win the trust of a sceptical public

Trying to get everyone to agree is a wild goose chase • Patrick Galbraith regrets that his views on conservation don’t necessarily always align with those of Hoxton musicians or the big beasts of the shooting world

All sweetness and light • Two hundred years after his birth, critic and poet Matthew Arnold still has much to teach conservatives

Ideology + competence = success • The Truss debacle does not refute the Thatcherite principle of sound money

Some wars are just • Daniel Johnson says a new film of a classic First World War novel focuses attention on the pacifism of the German elite that denies Ukraine the means of liberation

STUDIO • Country church monuments

Adam Dant on …

Puncturing Putin’s dangerous myths • Victor Sebestyen is an historian of Eastern Europe, Russia and Communism

The fatal hubris of a ruthless fixer

The feud that felled the Roman empire

New tunes from a hatful of old songs

A forgotten...