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.

THE UNIVERSITY LIE

The Critic

Pornification of everything

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

Royals on the witness stand • Prince Harry is not setting a precedent with his recent appearance in court

Woman About Town

NOVA’S DIARY

SUMMER SALE SIX MONTHS FOR £10

Work and wine don’t mix • Sadly, temperance is far better for the bottom line

Don’t hobble the House • Proposals to further reform the British constitution will only serve to weaken Parliament’s democratic power

Professor Arif Ahmed • The philosopher charged with defending campus free speech is robustly independent, happy to take on vested interests — and not easily pigeonholed

We need to reframe the way we thinkabout “free speech” • SEBASTIAN MILBANK argues that censorship is not only desirable but necessary if a democratic society and its laws are to function correctlyrectly

Don’t mention the war • Peter Hitchens says a rosy-hued invocation of the Blitz spirit was a hopelessly misguided metaphor for the Covid pandemic. The really admirable virtue of the Second World War was Britain’s courageous defence of liberty at almost any cost

Jesus Christ was a trans woman

THE ELEGANT EXTREMIST • Ian McEwan is a writer who from the beginning has known how to sweeten his often bitter and shocking stories with polished prose and meticulous plotting

SALUTE THE MASTER OF SWORD AND WORD • Robert Lyman says Field Marshal William Slim was not only Britain’s greatest military field commander, but our finest soldier-writer, too

TWILIGHT WITH VENUS • Henry Miller spent the last four years of his life hopelessly in love with a Playboy model 60 years his junior

PARADISE DIMMED • John Milton’s Paradise Lost is the greatest poem in the English language, yet it seems to be fading slowly from public view. Who could write a new national epic?

Celestria Parfitt • Impediment to scholarship

Can Sunak turn the polls around? • It might be prudent for the Conservatives to plan for defeat but it is difficult to do

THE DISSENTING DOCTOR • A leading psychiatrist is worried that a new government bill threatens his groundbreaking talking therapy for gender dysphoria

EVERYDAY LIES WITH THEODORE DALRYMPLE

The church that cheers murder • Christians must stand against the Church of Uganda over its support for a horrific law

BREAKING TABOOS WITH CLAY • Jo Bartosch interviews ceramicist Claudia Clare, whose uncompromising work has upset the censorious art world

How the Bank lost the plot • The Bank was warned that the growth in new money would cause prices to jump

Twin totems of Teutonic angst • DANIEL JOHNSON ON THE GERMAN OBSESSION WITH GOETHE’S FAUST AND SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

Noise annoys • Social norms benefit us all: don’t steal, don’t blare music, don’t defecate in the street

ON THE PASSING OF THE GREAT GENERATION • As told in flimsy anecdote

STUDIO • Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise—His Final Months, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Adam Dant on …

The Critic Books • Lost in the eye of the hurricane

Those golden years

Pandemics, plagues and pestilence

The duty of care

Asking the right questions about race

Excellent buildings elegantly explained

On the radar

Art’s tragic tug-of-war

Riches of the East

Lost in translation

The pains of Victorian...