The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

For one of the most famous historians in Britain, conquering the past is not enough.This month, alongside co-host Tabitha Syrett, Dominic Sandbrook is launching a new podcast - this time shifting his focus from history to literature.Tanjil Rashid sat down with Sandbrook to talk about this new venture, what he’s reading (he insists it’s a balanced diet) and why reading still matters, not just to us as individuals, but to the health of society itself.

Wuthering Heights is a story that has been told and retold, adapted and reinterpreted so many times since publication in 1847.Every generation seems to rediscover Emily Brontë’s ever-enduring novel, and every generation seems convinced it finally understands it.Now, it’s British filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s turn. And once again, we’re left asking: is this a love story, a ghost story, a story of obsession, or something stranger that refuses to settle into any single interpretation?Tanjil Rashid is joined by Lucasta Miller.

A new documentary, Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision, offers a rare glimpse into the deeper ideas shaping King Charles’s view of the world. Known for decades as an environmental campaigner, the King has often spoken about the need for “harmony” between humanity, nature and the environment - but what does he really mean by that?Tanjil Rashid is joined by historian Mark Sedgwick.

Thirty years ago, David Foster Wallace published Infinite Jest - a novel so sprawling, so formally strange, and so unnervingly prescient that it has never quite stopped happening. Set in a near-future North America obsessed with pleasure, entertainment, and escape, the book asked a question that feels even sharper today than it did in 1996: what happens when a culture confuses happiness with anaesthesia?Tanjil Rashid is joined by DT Max and Jonathan Derbyshire to discuss why the novel still matters, and what it can tell us about the world we’ve built since.

A professional sumo tournament in London in October 2025 offered more than sporting spectacle. It became a lens through which to view Japan’s growing cultural pull in the West, a society where ancient ritual, hierarchy and Shinto belief coexist with hyper-modern life. Tanjil Rashid is joined by historian Christopher Harding to explore how Japan balances tradition and modernity, and why that balance is proving increasingly compelling to Western audiences.

Born into a Muslim family in Bombay, India, in 1947, two months before the country’s partition, educated in the UK and now resident in New York, Salman Rushdie is a writer of multiple, interconnected worlds. At the heart of his work – ever since he won the 1982 Booker Prize with Midnight’s Children – has been some kind of history: the world’s, his own, or both at once. The latest chapter in the history of Rushdie’s life sees the now 78-year-old writer – and survivor of a near-fatal assassination attempt – turn his mind to ageing and dying. That is the unifying thread running through the narratives in his 26th book, the short story collection The Eleventh Hour. He sat down with the New Statesman's culture editor, Tanjil Rashid, late last year.

The youngest winner of the Booker Prize fell silent for nearly 20 years. Now she's back with a new novel.--With only her second novel The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai won the 2006 Booker Prize, the leading literary prize in the global Anglosphere, becoming - at the time - the youngest person ever to do so. She was thirty-five. Then: silence. 19 years of it, before another novel emerged - this year. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.Desai joins Tanjil Rashid on The New Society to discuss her latest novel, and why it was 19 years in the making.

The experimental novelist on finding God, being "a misfit" and her return to writing.--Nicola Barker is "has broken the mould so many times it's almost beyond repair".She's a post-punk literary anarchist who writes from the peripheries of the UK.Her experiments with narrative form have won her many plaudits, including the Goldsmith's Prize for literary fiction, which the New Statesman partners with.Barker joins Tanjil Rashid on the New Statesman culture podcast to discuss her latest novel, Tony Interrupter: a comedy about art, virality, chaos, and the surprising impact of freak events in Kent.