There is something uniquely dreadful about the situation Gordon Brown found himself in as he returned from his summer holiday. He should have been basking in the reflected glory of the "Team GB" Olympic success. This could have been his "1966 moment". But somehow even the words of congratulation from Downing Street misfired. "I think the whole nation is totally delighted and really proud at everything that's been achieved," he [...]

It is difficult to know what to do about people visiting this site who hide behind their anonymity to make obsessive and personal comments. We do not have a policy on these so-called "trolls". Perhaps we should. Much of this comment would never have seen the light of day in the pre-internet age because there is only a certain amount of space on the letters page. Magazines and newspapers do [...]

I have just read the obituary of Michael Baxandall in the Telegraph. I was deeply affected by his Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy . As the obituary says, the book "demonstrated that context should be taken much more widely. to include not just the learning of humanists, but also practical skills -- and not just those of the elite, such as dancing and manners, but [...]

Gill Hicks and her husband Joe Kerr are completely remarkable people. Their Walktalk project is an initiative to bring together Muslims and non-Muslims working for peace and tackling extremism and intolerance together. They have walked from Leeds to London via 22 towns and cities including Luton, from where the bombers took the train to carry out their suicide mission.

The walkers were joined en route by Met [...]

There has already been a phenomenal response to our New Statesman Investigates feature. At the last count more than two-thirds of people were voting for us to look into the scandal of the treatment of asylum seekers in this country. There are still large numbers voting for us to have a dig around the UK's lobbying industry. But not so much interest in Tory party funding, Prince Charles [...]

The summer is the time to try of new columnists or just mix it around a bit. Rafael Behr makes a good fist of it in the Observer's main politics slot arguing for the Westminster Village to take "fourth-party politics" more seriously. Despite the excruciating premiership football references (such laddishness is seen as necessary in case anyone mistook Britain's oldest newspaper for the senior common room), this is [...]

Thanks to the wonders of Google and the New Statesman's peerless web team I can now reveal the articles that you readers have loved and loathed the best. Click on the links to be angered or soothed one more time.

1. The Great Betrayal2. Hamas at Olympia3. Wanted: New Thinking Pioneers4. Unity Mitford and Hitler's Baby5. [...]

When Livingstone and his Trotskyist cronies were given a multi-million pound payoff from city hall I wondered how much they would be giving away to good causes. As it happens it's Livingstone and his aide John Ross who have been reviving charity - from the Chinese government.

As Andrew Gilligan reports in today's Evening Standard these champions of the working person stayed at [...]

The battle lines are now drawn and the fight for the soul of the Labour Party has begun in earnest. In some ways this is a blessed relief. David Miliband's pre-holiday intervention in the Guardian lanced a disfiguring conspiratorial boil that had been festering for far too long. The candidate of the "anyone but Miliband" campaign has yet to emerge, but already there is talk of a union-backed "bloke ticket" [...]

In recent years the New Statesman has developed an unrivalled reputation for investigative journalism. Whether it was Stephen Gray's revelations about CIA rendition flights, Martin Bright's string of stories exposing the link between the Foreign Office's and radical Islamists or Chris Ames's work on the government's notorious dossier on weapons of mass destruction, the NS has a trackrecord of being there first.

Now we want to get you involved. In [...]