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Your weekly review of culture, life and society from the New Statesman, hosted by Tanjil Rashid.
Featuring interviews with literary and artistic greats, reviews of the latest cultural moments, and in-depth discussion to help you understand how culture shapes society – and our place in it.
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Philippa Gregory: Boxing used to be a women's sport
Four hundred years on, we still can’t stop reading about the Tudors, and nobody has fed that habit better than Philippa Gregory. Often called the queen of British historical fiction, Gregory has sold millions of books by asking who history
Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist
In this week’s magazine, we published an open letter, signed by over 150 leading authors, artists and public figures, titled “Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist”. https://www.newstatesman.com/cover-story/2026/10/sally-rooney-is-a-wri
Carlo Rovelli: Can we know how it feels to be someone else?
Carlo Rovelli is a physicist. But he’s also so much more than that. Perennially on lists of the world’s top thinkers, Rovelli likes to think and think hard, about the big questions, where physics meets philosophy and art and literature. Can
Steven Pinker: Common knowledge can start revolutions
You know what you know, and I know what I know, but only when we know what the other knows do we have common knowledge. That’s the crux of cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s latest work, focusing on the shift from private to public know
How to write when everything’s in flux
Every story, they say, needs a beginning, a middle and an end; every story needs a setting. What if that isn’t true? Can you write when everything is in flux, when you are unmoored from places, and when the time is out of joint? Tanjil Rash
Katherine Rundell: In today's world, wonder is political
"We live in a world that deserves unicorns," says Katherine Rundell. If you haven't come across Rundell's work yet, you will soon. She's written over a dozen books, including an award-winning biography of John Donne and the children's fanta
James Marriott: what happens when we stop reading?
A third of British adults who used to read for pleasure don't anymore. And according to the OECD, literacy itself, not just the habit of it, is declining or stagnating across most of the developed world. In a new book, The New Dark Ages, Ja
Salman Rushdie: "I feel a line of connection with 9/11"
Terror has sought Salman Rushdie out time and time again for the past 40 years, ever since the controversial publication of his novel The Satanic Verses and the furious response to it from much of the Muslim world. He believed that his life
RF Kuang is back with her most personal story yet
Historical fantasy, campus satire, industry exposé; five books in, and no one's quite worked out what a "RF Kuang novel" is supposed to look like. That's rather the point. This September she publishes her sixth: Taipei Story, a semi-autobio
Simon Sebag Montefiore on Israel, Gaza and a Middle East in crisis
From the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the current escalation of the war between Israel, Palestine and their neighbouring countries, the Middle East has been besieged by almost constant conflict. Is it history? Politics? Resources? Or relig
This is how Ukrainian artists are fighting back
Charlotte Higgins has spent most of her career interviewing and critiquing artists, authors and poets as the Guardian's chief culture writer. It was unlikely that her work would ever take her to a warzone. But following Russia's full-scale
Why we must unite working class communities across racial divides
In the summer of 2024, riots tore through British towns, and since then old questions have continued to resurface about who belongs in the country. Taj Ali has spent years digging into a history that’s rarely told in full: the long traditio
Britain is losing its libraries and its cultural memory
Every year, more libraries across Britain close their doors. As councils have their funding slashed, these are often the first spaces to go. What do we lose when we stop reading and collecting? What is a library to a community, beyond its b
Why is sex political?
To hear more conversations like this search "The Exchange" wherever you get your podcasts. When Amia Srinivasan published The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century in 2021, it sparked widespread debate about the politics of des
Can we separate great art from bad artists?
Throughout history, art, and artists, have caused moral outrage. For a long time we had the liberal notion that we could separate great art from bad artists, but we do seem to live in a time of heightened moralisation around works of art an
Odyssey mania is upon us
Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s epic poem is one of the most anticipated films in recent cinema history. But what is it about this story, first told maybe 3000 years ago, that so fascinates us? Who really wrote it and why doe
Was the American revolution really American?
Hot dogs, fireworks, old glory, it’s the 4th July. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the USA’s Declaration of Independence. What led up to these crucial events in 1776? Was the revolution truly American? And what does this anniversar
"I thought Jimmy Carter was black" | Tayari Jones interview
Tayari Jones is one of America's most celebrated novelists, twice chosen by Oprah, shortlisted for prizes on both sides of the Atlantic, and read by presidents. Her newest book was meant to be a tale of gentrification in the American South,
Will Hockney be remembered as one of the greats?
Andrew Marr and the New Statesman's art critic Michael Prodger join Tanjil Rashid to discuss the life and legacy of David Hockney, who passed away last week. A Bradford boy who became one of the most famous artists in the world. A gay man w
Does travel actually broaden the mind?
“The traveller sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” Andrea Wulf joins us to discuss her new book The Traveller, about George Forster - the forgotten naturalist who sailed with Captain James Cook at seventeen and cam
This house believes that Britain’s best days are behind it
There is in Britain today a widespread mood of public despair, a deep premonition of imminent national decline. According to Ipsos, just over half of Britons feel worse off since Keir Starmer was elected. Going further back, 60% feel the co
Can architecture be democratic?
What is the relationship between politics and the built environment? between the spaces inhabited by the public and the policies that govern them? From parliaments to monuments… from open squares to closed off palaces… there clearly is a co
Katja Hoyer: How fascism takes hold of a city
Political instability, democratic decline, the rise of populist movements - politicians and headlines today are quick to diagnose things as modern day Weimar. But what was Weimar actually like, and how did a city associated with culture and
Munya Chawawa: Trump's presidency is based on WWE
Donald Trump’s political style has often been compared to reality TV - but what if the better comparison is professional wrestling? Satirist Munya Chawawa joins Luke O’Reilly to discuss his new documentary, Wrestling With Trump, which explo
William Boyd on spy fiction and the British psyche
What makes someone a good spy? And does the fiction writer, in many senses a professional liar, share the traits of a double agent? Novelist and screenwriter William Boyd first explored the theme of espionage in his 2002 novel Any Human Hea
James Baldwin would be a leading progressive voice today
For decades, James Baldwin has stood as one of the most piercing moral voices of the 20th century, But Baldwin himself has remained, in his own words, elusive. A new biography by Nicholas Boggs - Baldwin: A Love Story - sets out to change t
Mark Gatiss: What it's like to play Hitler
The Resistible rise of Arturo Ui, Bertolt Brecht's darkly comic allegory of authoritarianism is a play that straddles past and present. Written in 1941, it was conceived as a warning; a grotesque gangster-inflected retelling of the rise of
Are we truly living in 'Orwellian times'?
Or has the term lost its meaning? It’s a label that’s everywhere now: used by political commentators, thrown around on social media, and increasingly a part of everyday conversation. In recent months it's been used to describe matters inclu
When it comes to the Moon, we've only scratched the surface
Last night, the Artemis II crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after a 10-day mission to space and a lunar flyby. The voyage, which included the first woman and a non-US citizen to take part in a lunar mission, is part of a program to p
What was life like before capitalism?
It's almost impossible to separate how we think about modern life from the phenomenon that is capitalism, and to think, what would life look like without it? Tanjil Rashid is joined by Sven Beckert, Professor of History at Harvard Universit
