The way we were

Foreword

Crunched

If I ruled the world

We have to head towards a world in which everyone has

Letters & opinions

Rachel Sylvester is right in her assessment that Theresa

Austerity’s death rattle

Good riddance to a failed policy

How Corbyn learned to compromise

The man who promised to stick to his principles discovered a third way

What is a home?

The Grenfell fire forces Britain to confront its greatest failure

Wanted—young blood for an old party

Age is suddenly everything in politics. The Tories must skip a generation

Fast lane to better cities

Forget New York—look to Los Angeles. And get a grip on traffic

Blinded by sexism

Science is not immune from gender stereotypes

Saudi Arabia’s game

Qatar is not sinless—but it is fundamentally in the right

Be afraid

Cyber-attacks are the biggest threat we face

Breathe uneasy

London has the world’s most polluted air on some measures—and it really is a killer

Is inequality the root of all social ills?

YES Everybody is against inequality, yet nobody thinks

The hidden rewiring

Accounts of the financial crisis leave out the story of the secretive deals between banks that kept the show on the road. How long can the system be propped up for?

Where are the guilty men?

There has been vanishingly little personal accountability for the financial crisis

Stagnant economics, electric politics

After Lehman Brothers tumbled, leaders fell like dominoes. Recession unleashed a raging chaos that has bequeathed a polarised debate

The culture crunch

Instead of getting even, we retreated into a cosy world of baking, craft ale and historical novels

Degrees of failure

Universities have grown vast and vastly expensive. Time to stop and ask if they do any good

Watch your backbenchers

Individual MPs are lobby fodder no longer. And in a hung parliament they can call the shots

The crisis of expertise

Academic elites are finding it harder to be heard. But is that because of how they talk down to non-specialists? And how solid is their much-vaunted evidence base anyway?

The victim trap

Playing for pity in the face of IS atrocities can be counter-productive. The Ismailis are suffering but are determined to keep control of their story FAISAL DEVJI

Political football

In Argentina a populist government made the beautiful game free to view on television. But, now the resurgent right-wing has blown the whistle, watch out for the backlash DAVID GOLDBLATT

Independent thinking from polity

“Yarov shows both the self-sacrifice and the selfishness

When to throw in the towel

Boxing’s glory days are over but writers are still addicted to the ultimate drama, says Kasia Boddy

Art

Matisse’s revolutionary art was inspired by his most

Fleece academy

It’s a shame this gleeful attack on Harvard Business School misses its target, says Howard Davies

Theatre

The honour of being the first senior British playwright

Classical

If the BBC Proms is all-consuming, then Edinburgh is

Heartfelt high jinks

Tom Stoppard has been astonishing audiences for 50 years with his dazzlingly cerebral and surprisingly moving plays, says Andrew Dickson

Film

On 25th July 1967, Detroit was two days into riots.

Who killed rock’n’roll?

Guns N’ Roses did—when they made an album so breathtakingly brash and catchy no one could beat it, argues Jay Elwes

Ballet & opera

Mariinsky Ballet, Royal Opera House 25th July to 5th

Science

There are few more beautiful places in London than

Books in brief

Chris Patten doesn’t like political memoirs: not the

Book Club

The Prospect Book Club meets every third Monday of

Brief encounter

VJ Day, the end of the Second World War. I remember

Thinking out of the trench

At our Think Tank Awards, the big brains were focused on the dangers of division PROSPECT STAFF

Leith on language

There was a time when “weed” and “chilling with my

Life of the mind

Oh, hallowed halls of the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Matters of taste

The last time Dad was released from hospital we thought

Wine

Which emotions do wines conjure up? This is not an

DIY investor

It has been a long wait for DIY investors but at last

The generalist by Didymus

1 Largest man-made lake in Western Europe which supplies

Enigmas & puzzles

Professor Neuron has taken his nephew Trifle to the

How to enter

Diamond. Together, they tell a story of greed, murder