The Critic Current Issue – Nov’24 issue

In the November issue of The Critic, Andrew Orlowski examines why the National Grid is likely to fail sooner than we think, plunging Britain into blackouts, Jonathan Ford delves into the costly saga of state and corporate failure at Belfast’s Harland & Wolff shipyard, Richard Negus exposes the error in the government’s biodiversity statistics whilst Laurent Lemasson and Gavin Mortimer examine why French voters prefer the policies of the Left and Right, yet neither win power.

Also, the ethicist Nigel Biggar and philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy are profiled, Pierre d’Alancaisez deplores how art critics have become promoters, Robert Thicknesse extols London’s lost pleasure gardens, Sarah Ditum lauds the music of Kirsty MacColl, Robert Hutton reviews the latest political memoirs, Henry Jeffreys savours the “Barolo of the South” and on its fiftieth anniversary, Boris Starling relives the jabs and hooks that won the Rumble in the Jungle.