The New Society | culture from the New Statesman
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- 14 Nov 2026
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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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Épisodes 47
An interview with Booker winner M John Harrison
Earlier this week the genre defying novelist M. John Harrison was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize.This comes after a career spanning 6 decades, publishing over 20 books ranging from the sub genres …
Notes de l’épisode
Earlier this week the genre defying novelist M. John Harrison was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize.
This comes after a career spanning 6 decades, publishing over 20 books ranging from the sub genres 'Mountain Literature' to 'Space Opera'. He is the oldest ever recipient of the prize.
His latest work is titled "The End of Everything" and it is as apocalyptic as it sounds, set on the coast of Kent as the indecipherable alien entity named "the iGhetti" swarm above.
Our online editor, Emily Lawford, spoke with M. John Harrison shortly after he received the Booker prize.
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What 100 years of John Berger has taught us
John Berger taught a generation to look at paintings and then to distrust the people selling them. He won the Booker Prize in 1972 and used his acceptance speech to criticise the sponsor, then gave half the …
Notes de l’épisode
John Berger taught a generation to look at paintings and then to distrust the people selling them.
He won the Booker Prize in 1972 and used his acceptance speech to criticise the sponsor, then gave half the money to the Black Panthers. He made a name for himself as the New Statesman's art critic.
This week marks what would have been his one hundredth birthday. He left us in 2017, but his cultural footprint looms large - new generations finding him through mediums even he wouldn't have foreseen.
Tom Overton has spent fifteen years reckoning with that legacy - starting even before Berger died. He started as the archivist cataloguing Berger’s papers at the British Library, and ended up on the receiving end of late-night phone calls that began, “This is John. John Berger.” Now he’s written the biography: John Berger: From Life.
So what do you do with a hundred years of Berger? Who was he, and why do we still need his company?
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 forgot and who it blamed.
She joins Tanjil Rashid in this episode of The New Society to discuss her life, career, the forgotten women of history and why history has become so culturally in demand.
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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” …
Notes de l’épisode
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-writer-not-a-terrorist
Tanjil Rashid is joined by Megan Gibson to discuss why the New Statesman published this open letter in support of Sally Rooney.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 we ever truly know what it feels like to be someone, or something, else? Is the mind separate from the body? What even is life? Where could it possibly come from? Where could the universe come from?
These are the questions Rovelli has a stab at answering in his new book On the Equality of All Things: Physics and Philosophy. In particular he draws on quantum mechanics and ancient Eastern thought to argue that the world is not made of separate categories but is one interconnected web of relations, where things are defined by how they interact with everything else.
Tanjil Rashid is joined by Carlo Rovelli.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 knowledge, and how this can suddenly change behaviours or even start revolutions.
Steven Pinker joins Tanjil Rashid to discuss.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 Rashid is joined by Amit Chaudhuri, a singer, composer, poet, critic and novelist, to discuss how a story is less important – and less interesting – than the movement of life.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
"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 fantasy series Impossible Creatures - a copy of which every Year 6 child in the country will receive this Christmas. Disney has just signed a seven-figure deal for the screen adaptation.. Rundell is being touted as the next JK Rowling.
When she's not writing Rundell works on Renaissance literature as a fellow of Oxford University.
Two themes recur throughout her work: fantasy and animals. And as you might guess from her feelings about unicorns, the two are rarely far apart.
On this episode she joins Tanjil Rashid, following the publication of her new essay collection Napolean's Orangutang to talk about what humans should learn from animals, the connection between religion and fantasy, and - in her words - why wonder is political.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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, James Marriott argues that we're living through a great unwinding: a retreat from the written word and the kind of rational, analytical mind that print culture built over five centuries, back towards something closer to the pre-literate world: one dominated not by books, but by images, screens, and short-form video.
In this episode, Tanjil Rashid is joined by James Marriott to ask: are we really heading back into the dark?
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 of extreme measures and isolation was a closed chapter in 1998, after Iran stepped back from the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini. But four summers ago, in a quiet lake town in New York, death came knocking again. Rushdie was about to give a public lecture when a man ran on stage and attacked him with a knife.
He first revisited this attempt on his life in his 2024 book Knife. Now, with his wife, the poet and visual artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and director Alex Gibney, Rushdie has retold this life-changing moment through film.
He spoke with Tanjil Rashid on the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, with which he feels a “line of connection” - between the attack on himself and the attack on his adopted home in New York, and reflected on what it means to live in this age of terror.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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-autobiographical account of a summer spent learning Mandarin in Taiwan - her most personal book yet.
She joins Tanjil Rashid in this episode of the podcast.
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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? …
Notes de l’épisode
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 religion driving these tensions?
Tanjil Rashid is joined by historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose new book The Cauldron tells the story of the making of the modern Middle East.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 invasion of Ukraine, she found herself drawn to this country under siege. She wanted to ask, what happens to art under war? And could Ukrainian culture not just survive, but flourish?
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 tradition of South Asian political activism in Britain.
His debut book, Come What May, We’re Here to Stay, traces that tradition and asks what it means for Britain now.
Taj Ali joins Tanjil Rashid.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 books?
Tanjil Rashid is joined by the University of Oxford's Bodley's Librarian, Richard Ovenden.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 desire, consent, and sexual justice.
In this episode of The Exchange, the Oxford academic joins Tanjil Rashid to discuss how philosophy can illuminate some of the most contentious questions in contemporary culture: from incels and pornography to whether our desires are shaped by society.
Find more from Amia Srinivasan here
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 and their creators. Why is that?
Tanjil Rashid is joined by Daisy Dixon, who has written the book Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 does it represent, with Homer’s other great work The Iliad, the foundation of western literature?
Tanjil Rashid is joined by The Odyssey’s latest translator, classical scholar and literary critic Daniel Mendelsohn
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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? …
Notes de l’épisode
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 anniversary represent today?
Tanjil Rashid is joined by Sarah Pearsall, historian and author of Freedom Round the Globe: How the World Made the American Revolution.
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"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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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, she found herself an entirely different story. Kin follows two motherless girls coming of age in 1950s Louisiana, the Jim Crow South.It's a novel about female friendship, class, race, and motherhood.
Jones discusses her latest book, about growing up "bourgeois and segregated" in Atlanta as the daughter of civil rights activists, and what it's like to watch America try to turn the clock back on progress as it approaches its 250th birthday.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 who made desire visible decades before it was safe to do so. A painter who took on the iPhone and the iPad and bent new technology to the oldest of artistic impulses. What do the pools, hedgerows and iPad drawings add up to?
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
“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 came back convinced of something radical: that all human beings are equal.
We ask why that idea was so scandalous in the Enlightenment, why Forster has been largely written out of history, and whether travel really does broaden the mind - or whether, as G.K. Chesterton suggested, it might do the opposite.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 country has gone backwards since 2022.
Are Britain's best days really behind it?
Pratinav Anil, Rachel Clarke, Tanjil Rashid, John Kampfner, Gary Stevenson, and Polly Toynbee debate the issue.
This debate was chaired by Anoosh Chakelian and recorded at the Cambridge Literary Festival.
Find out more here: cambridgeliteraryfestival.com
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 connection, but how that manifests itself remains deeply contested.
Tanjil Rashid is joined by Jan Werner-Muller, a German philosopher and historian, whose latest book, Street, Palace, Square: The Architecture of Democratic Spaces investigates this relationship between place, people and politics.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 intellectual life become bound up with the rise of Nazism?
Historian Katja Hoyer joins us to discuss her new book on Weimar, the process of fascism taking hold at a local level, her previous book Beyond the Wall, and what today’s politics, including the rise of Alternative for Germany, may and may not have in common with the past.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 explores the connections between WWE spectacle and modern American politics.
Wrestling with Trump is available to stream now on 4.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 Heart and went on to pen a James Bond continuation novel called Solo.
His latest trilogy (Gabriel's Moon, The Predicament and Cold Sunset) explores what happens when a travel writer becomes entangled in Cold War Espionage.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 that.
Drawing on newly uncovered archives and decades of research, Boggs reframes Baldwin’s life through an intimate and sometimes unsettling lens: love.
Luke O'Reilly sits down with Nicholas Boggs to discuss Baldwin’s loves and contradictions, the relationship between intimacy and politics, and why Baldwin’s insistence that “love is the only reality” might matter more now than ever.
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 Adolf Hitler. It holds out the warning that such a rise is not, in fact, inevitable – it can be resisted.
In a new production, Mark Gatiss steps into the role of Arturo Ui, a character who is at once absurd, ridiculous, sinister, and terrifying. It's a part that delicately walks the tightrope between satire and menace.
So how does a play rooted in 20th century politics land in Britain today? What does it mean to stage breath in an era saturated with political performance and media spectacle? And can satire still function as a warning rather than just a mirror?
Tanjil Rashid speaks with Mark Gatiss in this fascinating and wide-ranging interview.
Mark Gatiss is speaking at the Stratford Literary Festival on Sunday 10 May. Book tickets: https://www.stratfordliteraryfestival.co.uk/
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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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 including Indian cricket, Sainsbury's use of facial recognition, the 'Dubai Dream'.
But what did George Orwell actually warn us about, and how closely does our modern world resemble it?
Nick Harris speaks to acclaimed Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, whose latest film Orwell: 2+2=5 revisits Orwell not as a distant, dystopian novelist, but as a deeply political thinker, shaped by his own life experience: his birth in colonial India, his immersion in the working class, his wartime fight against fascism.
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