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Here are three of the many people with whom Virginia Verasis, Contessa di Castiglione, had sex: Victor Emmanuel II, king of Sardinia/Savoy and subsequently of all Italy; Napoleon III, emperor of the French; Adolphe Thiers, a president of France’s Third Republic, writes Lucy Hughes-Hallett.⁠
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In her lifetime (1837-99), Europe was in a state of flux. New nations (Italy and Germany) were coming into being, elbowing aside ancient principalities and powers. Castiglione believed that she was among those reshaping the continent. She claimed that it was she who “by myself” (forget Mazzini, Cavour and Garibaldi) “made Italy”. She also claimed that she had saved the papacy by advising the Pope to remain in Rome in 1870, and that it was thanks to her intervention that Bismarck held his troops back from sacking Paris in 1871.⁠
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It appears, though, from Benedetta Craveri’s exhaustive biography, that Castiglione’s greatest talent was not for statecraft, but for making a spectacle of herself. In the 1850s she began a collaboration with the Parisian photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson, commissioning and art-directing dramatic portraits of herself. Posing in fantastical hairstyles and costumes, she was creating wordless mini-dramas – enigmatic, strikingly beautiful, surreal avant la lettre. There were hundreds of images. They were made up into albums, which she gave to her friends. She was creating a new art form, much admired by the aesthetes of the next generation. In 1913, Count Robert de Montesquiou wrote her biography, La Divine Comtesse, which celebrated her self-fashioning. His friend Gabriele d’Annunzio, another master of that art, contributed an introductory essay.⁠
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Read Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s review of The Contessa by Benedetta Craveri, trs Alex Andriesse at the link in our bio⁠
Lock up your emperors: the contessa at 25, in Etruscan costume for a ball in 1863. PVDE, all rights reserved 2026 / Bridgeman Images by @newstatesman

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Fairy tales were not – or not just – entertainment for children, writes John Gray.⁠
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As JRR Tolkien frames the genre in his 1939 lecture “On Fairy Stories”, they comprised complete and coherent “secondary” worlds, alternate realities formed by their “sub-creators” as refuges from disenchantment. Middle-earth may never have existed, but the simple pastoral life it conjures up represents an alternative to a desolate, machine-governed modernity.⁠
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Freely admitting that The Lord of the Rings was an exercise in escapist myth-making, Tolkien insisted that seeking escape from mechanisation was both natural and rational. The crucible of his mythology was his experience as a front-line officer in the First World War. Deployed to France in June 1916, he arrived just before the Battle of the Somme. At the time it concluded in September of that year, it was the bloodiest single battle in modern history, with more than a million casualties, including over 300,000 deaths. On its first day (1 July 1916), British forces alone suffered more than 57,00 casualties, nearly 20,000 of them fatalities. Exposed to artillery bombardment and the filthy carnage of the trenches, Tolkien contracted trench fever and was evacuated back to Britain in October 1916. The illness – spread by lice – saved his life. By 1918, all but one of his closest prewar friends were dead and his battalion almost annihilated.⁠
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As DJ Taylor, the critic, novelist and biographer of George Orwell, notes in this engaging and illuminating study, Tolkien dismissed any suggestion that his work reflected his life in any direct fashion. Writing to WH Auden, a lifelong admirer, he described himself as a writer “whose instinct is to cloak such self-knowledge as he has, and such criticisms of life as he knows it, under mythological and legendary dress”.⁠
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Read John Gray's review of The King Under the Mountain: In Search of JRR Tolkien by DJ Taylor⁠
“A shadowy silent world”: Tolkien’s deathly landscapes resemble the front as depicted in We Are Making a New World (1918) by Paul Nash. Image via Alamy by @newstatesman

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“It’s cold, it’s rocky, there’s physical abuse.”

This week, Robert Jenrick claimed Reform would let the Navy use “lethal force” against migrants crossing the channel.

Anoosh Chakelian has spoken to people who made the dangerous journey. Here’s what they told her. by @newstatesman

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I must confess to a hesitation, writes Oli Dugmore. ⁠
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It has become fashionable to describe things you don’t like in extreme terms. This is, I think, largely driven by algorithmic changes to our modes of communication. If you wish to be heard on social media, you will need to say something different and forceful, and how far the remark travels will be dictated by its capacity to provoke those listening. This has bled into other ways we talk. As the far right advances, we are told the fascists are at the gate. But this is where I have hesitated, at least until recently.⁠
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Fascism is not conservatism. Its building blocks are well known: authoritarianism, national supremacism, militarism and demagogy. Usually, it aims at some form of national rebirth under the guidance of a charismatic dictator, often accompanied by the aggressive expansion of a nation’s physical territory, while leveraging symbols and language as instruments of power. The context that has given rise to it is important too: economic collapse, technological revolution, national humiliation.⁠
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Read Oli Dugmore's Left Hook at the link in our bio by @newstatesman

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“ The Reform Party is actually a reaction to the failure of Brexit.”

Ethan Croft by @newstatesman

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The trains were, of course, running late, writes Megan Gibson. In the various emails the Home Office and council send formally inviting you to take part in a UK citizenship ceremony, they also warn, multiple times, that you must certainly not be late. (It seems that even when welcoming you into the fold, the Home Office can’t help but admonish foreigners one last time.) The ceremony is the final step in the protracted, years-long process of becoming a UK citizen, and any late arrivals on the day, I have been told, will need to reschedule. On a recent Monday morning, I nearly protracted my own process further because both Southeastern rail and the Tube’s Northern Line were experiencing severe delays.⁠
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But I arrive at Islington Town Hall in time – just –and I quickly melt into the queue of soon-to-be Brits shuffling into the grand council chambers. Though I no longer live in Islington, I was married in this Town Hall and have fond memories of it. When I filed my citizenship application, I discovered that you can select anywhere in the country for your ceremony to take place. The meat of each event is largely the same: you sing the national anthem, pledge allegiance to Crown and country, and vow to respect the UK’s democratic ideals. But suspecting – snobbishly and perhaps incorrectly – that the ceremonies in well-heeled Islington might involve more in the way of pageantry and perks than those in my local, cash-strapped borough of Lewisham, I had opted for the pomp. When I survey the refreshments that have been laid out for us in north London – Twinings and Nescafé, alongside small packets of shop-bought biscuits – I begin to question my strategy.⁠
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Read Megan Gibson's This England at the link in our bio⁠
Illustration by @itsleillo⁠ by @newstatesman

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Nigel Farage is the most successful British politician on TikTok.

Will Dunn explains how the platform is growing an older audience. by @newstatesman

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We had been promised America’s first electrified road, writes Katie Stallard. ⁠
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Dan Wang pulls out his phone again to check the map, squinting at a crossroads. According to the handout I had picked up, we are in Detroit’s “innovation community”, a sprawling 30-acre technology campus arrayed around a once-abandoned train station that will, its developers say, shape the “future of transportation worldwide”. Assuming, of course, that future is made in America.⁠
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Wang is well placed to assess those prospects. After working for a Silicon Valley logistics company, he moved to China in 2017, taking a job as a technology analyst for the economic research firm Gavekal Dragonomics. He returned to the US in 2023 and wrote the bestselling book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, establishing himself as one of the US’s most sought after interpreters of the tech rivalry between the two powers. He argues China is an “engineering state”, building at breakneck pace regardless of the human cost – an early working title for the book was “Move Fast and Break People” – while America is a “lawyerly society” excelling in “blocking everything it can”. Published shortly after Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, Wang’s theory added an international dimension to the growing anxiety that the US had lost its ability to build. That argument attracted attention far beyond America. Wang tells me that Keir Starmer and the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, both consulted his book ahead of their visits to Beijing.⁠
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Wang – softly spoken, with round glasses and closely cropped hair – divides his time between Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his wife is a professor at the University of Michigan, and California, where he is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He suggested meeting in Detroit, once one of the great engines of America’s industrial boom, to explore the city’s efforts to reinvent itself as a hub for new technology. Hence our search for the electrified road.⁠
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Read Katie Stallard's interview with Dan Wang at the link in our bio⁠
Dan Wang, photographed for the New Statesman by Arthur Gau by @newstatesman

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Last week, Marco Rubio flew to Athens, stood in front of the Acropolis and, with the Aegean sun setting softly behind him, made like an oracle, writes Tanjil Rashid. ⁠
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Forgoing the foreign policy quandaries you’d think a sitting US secretary of state would be preoccupied with, he turned to the life of the mind. “The Greeks of antiquity, they seem to have an almost mystical hold on our memory,” he burbled. “They call us back to them, again and again.”⁠
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Who would dare say he was wrong? For unless you have spent the year marooned on Calypso’s island, it won’t have escaped your notice that a film adaptation of an epic poem by a blind Greek bard who lived 2,700 years ago has somehow grossed $1.78bn. ⁠
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The following day, as if to drive home the point, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Anne Carson, the 76-year-old classicist who has spent her career augmenting and deepening that “mystical hold”, by recasting the poetry and drama of Greek antiquity into a language for today.⁠
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Remarkably, not even a Nobel could make Carson the most famous living translator of ancient Greek – after Emily Wilson became a viral celebrity this year. Her translation of the Odyssey has surpassed a million copies sold. In the UK, sales were up 1,000 per cent, even as Penguin released yet another translation of it.⁠
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Read Tanjil Rashid's column at the link in our bio⁠
Photo by Mark Schiefelbein / POOL / AFP via Getty Images by @newstatesman

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Britain doesn’t “ have some grand strategy here, worked out. We just muddle through.”

Tom McTague on the UK’s approach to AI by @newstatesman

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"The stakes. Tell them the stakes."

Naomi Klein has spent her whole life fighting against right-wing authoritarianism, but when Trump was reelected, her son felt like she hadn't done enough.

She tells @OliDugmore about "the stakes", the fragility of the natural world, and the importance of salmon.

Listen to The Exchange wherever you get your podcasts. by @newstatesman

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On the grounds of Beckett House, a Georgian manor in the village of Shrivenham, stands a white footbridge, writes Anoosh Chakelian. Gently arched, with wooden criss-cross sides, its curve reflects like a set of grinning teeth in the lake below. This is Cradle Bridge – a crossing no longer from lakeside folly to ancestral pile for assorted barons, but for officials at what has long been a military site.⁠
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But to me, it was always Poohsticks bridge. It was where my Nana would take my sister and me – evacuated for half-term down from London to the peaceful Wiltshire-Oxfordshire border – to collect pinecones and sticks. We would throw them in from one side of the bridge, and race them to the other side. This is a game accidentally invented by Winnie-the-Pooh, the ever resourceful bear behind our doziest of national sports (“They always take longer than you think,” says Rabbit).⁠
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Read Anoosh Chakelian's essay on Winnie-the-Pooh at the link in our bio⁠
Copyright © E.H.Shepard LLP / Estate of E.H.Shepard and Harper Collins Publishers Limited⁠ by @newstatesman

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