Super Mario
A brilliant writer with remarkable political gifts, Mario Vargas Llosa is a worthy winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
The Politics of Envy
That Howard Jacobson and V. S. Naipaul are non-members of the London literary establishment does them credit
China’s Great Firewall
The "Golden Shield Project" is blocking access to great swathes of the web, but Chinese netizens are fighting back
See No Evil
The "independent inquiry" into the radicalisation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab at UCL was a pathetic embarrassment
Hegemony 101
Antonio Gramsci's great theory has cropped up in an unlikely place — the A-level geography classroom
Flouting (Not Flaunting) the Rules of English
The teaching of grammar should be at the heart of the school syllabus. Without it we are killing intellectual curiosity
Incurable Romantics
The historian Tim Blanning and the critic Jonathan Bate discuss the place of Romanticism in contemporary culture with the Editor of Standpoint, Daniel Johnson
Eastern Questions
Crimea: The Last Crusade by Orlando Figes
The State of the State
The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life by Kenneth Minogue
Writers of the World, Unite
Politics and the Novel During the Cold War by David Caute
Mao’s Little Helpers
The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s by Richard Wolin
Perplexed of St. John’s Wood
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson