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.

Death by degrees

The Critic

Women should agree to disagree • Feminists should forget about pronouns and labels and tackle the real issues of women’s lives

Miriam Elia on…

Letters

Bring back the traitors • To abandon the crime of treason is to move towards a post-national future

Woman About Town

NOVA’S DIARY

New Year Sale! • A print and digital subscription to The Critic, plus a fabulous tote bag, for just £5!

We’ll always have Davos • It’s been failing every year since it began but we do need it — or something like it

WHY THE LIBERAL HAWKS RULE THE ROOST • Matthew Petti considers the ways in which shifting perspectives on US foreign policy adventures have shaped current thinking

EVERYDAY LIES WITH THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Back to reality • Objective truth is critically important. It is one of the greatest defences of our liberty

WHAT FUTURE FOR BENIN’S BRONZES? • Proponents of repatriation of the remarkable sculptures have shown scant regard to Nigeria’s endemic corruption and the fate of bronzes already sent back to Africa

The benefits of learning from home • Sebastian Milbank says the British model of a residential “university experience” saddles students with unnecessary debt and severs their links with their communities

I regret to inform you … • An Admissions Don at a major British university lays bare the quota-driven process of student selection and imagines what honest acceptance and rejection letters may look like

Deconstructing decolonisation • Nigel Biggar argues that at its most radical, the push for decolonising the curriculum rests on a series of false assumptions that we need to repudiate

The great international student scandal • Poppy Coburn says that with an ever-higher number of foreign postgraduates not even turning up for their courses, some universities are not selling an education, but a visa

Free speech: we should try it again • Lincoln Allison says we must sweep aside today’s pervasive fearfulness. Instead we should feel free to offend — and not take offence when others treat us equally robustly

Who will look after the kids? • Ellen Pasternack / Why should the State prioritise getting new mothers back to work above all else?

Why I’m blacker than Dr King

A study in radical rhetoric • Annie Ernaux’s work is a study in radical rhetoric. We can disagree with her politics while saying she deserves her Nobel Prize, says Henri Astier

Gretchen Bellamy Kindly Reviewer

Upside of the blockchain bust • As crypto madness fades, its prophets will be forced to do more productive work

Bret Easton Ellis — the enfant terrible who finally grew up • John Self looks at a “Brat Pack” writer who, after four decades in the wilderness, has at last lived up to the promise of his early work

Venice’s hidden treasure • Tiepolo’s glorious frescoes in the Palazzo Labia have been “under restoration” behind closed doors for more than a decade. So why is no work being done?

Prophet of Catholic conservatism • The magisterial Benedict XVI, one of the greatest minds ever to be elected pope, has bequeathed a lasting legacy

My perfect castaway • Robin Ashenden whiled away a forced sojourn in Georgia by feasting on the back catalogue of Desert Island Discs and compiling a list of his favourite guests

Adam Dant on …

STUDIO • Max Beckmann in Munich

Building a new world on the ruins of the old

Time doesn’t fly in Bianchini’s company

Many lives of the...