Westminster on speed

The media are blamed for creating a society awash with information but devoid of knowledge. Last November, in a foretaste of the election campaign, politicians showed that they must share the blame. Jane Robins reports on the arrival of digital politics

The second partition

Pakistan celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. But it is not the state that Jinnah created out of partition in 1947. In 1971 its more populous eastern wing declared unilateral independence. Colin Smith recalls the large and small atrocities that accompanied the birth of Bangladesh

Bring back Keynes

Keynesian economics has been in retreat politically and theoretically for 25 years. If the Keynesians can learn from their critics and curtail their ambitions, a modest rehabilitation is now appropriate

Cosmology and evolution

The US physicist Lee Smolin is proposing an extraordinary marriage of physics and biology. He argues that there are many universes and, like the laws of physics themselves, they are all evolving. Smolin has written the most important science book of 1997

Who was Nehru?

A new biography of Nehru by Stanley Wolpert has attracted scorn in New Delhi. Katherine Frank, who is herself writing a biography of Indira Gandhi, asks what we can learn from Wolpert's failures. If post-modern biography has liberated itself from portraying a "true self," does this mean that anything goes?

Who are the masters now?

David Goodhart

Elite led representative democracy is giving way to a media driven plebiscitary democracy. Britain's conversation with itself has become more open but less considered. The politicians are set to rebel against the constraints of the new populism

A literary engagement

Does literature serve any higher purpose beyond entertainment? Mario Vargas Llosa argues that, unlike television or cinema, it has a special ability and responsibility to address itself to the problems of its time

If George Eliot could vote

Eliot was a romantic conservative who would have preferred the dowdiness of the Majors to the smoothness of the Blairs. But Kathryn Hughes, her biographer, thinks Tony Booth would have swung her vote to New Labour

The moral minority

There was shit on the wall and pee running down the staircase. Derek Coombs recalls a problem estate suffering from the inexorable decline of stable families

Where's the strategy?

For the first time in centuries postwar Britain has no grand strategy. Ian Davidson fears that it will now be forced to follow Franco-German preferences

The Millbank moralist

Tony Wright is an impeccable New Labour Blairite, argues David Willetts, but his book has little to offer beyond outdated admiration for the German model and moral denunciation

Modern moral subjects

George Grosz was inspired by William Hogarth but Grosz gets better treatment from the Royal Academy than Hogarth gets from the Tate, says Norbert Lynton

Cold war closure

New research on the origins of the cold war is confirming the realist view that the Soviets were responsible for the conflict. Philip Gordon is impressed, but the revisionists have not had their last word

Modern manners

Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke reports on a lecherous hairdresser who decides to go on the stage

This sporting life

Leo McKinstry

Leo McKinstry says English cricket appears to be in a mess. But could it be New Labour, New Ashes victory?

The prisoner

Peter Wayne is planning to catch the conscience of the Home Secretary's wife with a Robert Browning play

Brussels diary

Brussels diary

Business

John Plender

Japanese businessmen like the idea of an Anglo-Saxon economy but not the reality

In fact