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.

WHERE’S REFORM’S BEEF?

The Critic

The five stages of victory

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

Time to kill the sacred cow? • Labour’s affection for the European Convention on Human Rights is on the wane

Woman About Town

PESTON’S INBOX

The folly of free-trade project fear • Globalism has lifted billions out of poverty. We should shout its success from the rooftops

Populism’s problem • The anti-elitism inherent in working-class, right-wing movements will prove their downfall, argues John McGuirk

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An apologist for Israel • Ben Sixsmith argues a new book on the Israel-Hamas conflict by Douglas Murray reveals him as an unreliable and deeply partisan cheerleader

THE TYRANNY OF EQUALITY • Ellen Pasternack says that a blinkered policy focus on eliminating inequality to the exclusion of all other considerations might end up making us all worse off

What a joke Canterbury is • The process of selecting a new head of the Church of England is absurd and ridulously slow

Lessons of the conclave • Pope Leo XIV sparked a media frenzy by becoming the first American to head the Holy See. He should take that as a warning to resist the siren call of celebrity culture and follow his own faith

THE MYTH OF CHURCH-SPONSORED SLAVERY • The Church of England’s self-flagellation over its supposed past investments in the slave trade is based on seriously flawed research

Might the Spire topple? • The Church’s expensive and controversial Project Spire is awaiting authorisation but …

Funding? Check your EDI policies

Lord Boothby • A sexually voracious bisexual buffoon who achieved little and was rescued from infamy by powerful friends

EVERYDAY LIES WITH THEODORE DALRYMPLE

A fearless, serious historian • Robert Crowcroft pays tribute to John Charmley, whose revisionist biographies of Chamberlain and Churchill were bold, ambitious and argumentative

Don’t kid yourself, Team Kemi • The Tories’ flailing failure looks more like performance art than sound political strategy

The prophet who is out of date • Superforecasting promised to make a science of prediction. It failed to predict its own demise

MESSAGE TO BRITAIN: GET REAL • We need a foreign policy that accepts the dark facts of international life. We must adjust to the retreat of American power, forge alliances in Europe and invest in credible defence

Getting our lame ducks in a row • Government energy policy is fuelling the collapse of Britain’s dwindling manufacturing sector

Emma Booster Indefatigable self-publicist

THE HORROR OF HOLIER-THAN-THOU GREETINGS INFLATION • It’s no longer enough to open casual conversations with emollient small talk. Social niceties today demand a peformative jeremiad on the state of the world and our own moral and intellectual superiority

A lesson in how to ruin a good university • The scandal at the University of Buckingham is a microcosm of the managerial cancer afflicting the higher education sector. The answer is to put academics back in charge

I should have been Pope

The maverick of Venice • Tim Abrahams on Pietrangelo Buttafuoco

Adam Dant on …

STUDIO • Frescoes of Bacchus in Pompeii

The long afterlife of a literary classic

Vivid and detailed but not definitive

Out of step with rural Britain’s history

The ancient pull of troubled waters

Betting on...