The Critic Magazine

27 May 2021

The June edition of The Critic, the magazine of ideas for open-minded readers, brings the East to the West this month with a range of articles about the rise of China. Rana Mitter examines if Beijing’s deteriorating relations with Washington, London and Sydney were inevitable or a consequence of specific policies and personalities and whether the current level of interdependence prevents the relationship from sinking further. Patrick Porter looks at America’s options for containing China, Oliver Wiseman measures China’s success in shaping American debate and the veteran Australian reporter, Paul Raffaele, recalls his time as the first accredited foreign television correspondent in Mao’s Peking in the 1970s. Closer to home, Lewis Baston outlines how and where Labour could work productively to form a left-progressive alliance with the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, while Robin Ashenden thinks he knows what Kenneth Tynan’s response would be to the guidelines for critics recently introduced by the actors’ union, Equity. John Kampfner charts the life of Horst Mahler, the former Baader-Meinhof lawyer and accomplice who converted to neo-Nazism, and Tim Abrahams argues that adaptation rather than preservation will better conserve modernist architecture. Plus, the magazine’s cultural critics, table talkers, cartoonist and parodists put the present day in perspective.