'If The Magic Mountain is... “a kind of summing up of the European soul and mind”, we must also realise this encompasses, no less, Europe’s anxious encounter with Asia.' A stylish and original reading of The Magic Mountain by Tanjil Rashid: newstatesman.com/ideas/2024/11/…

The Bengali Marxist film director Ritwik Ghatak once, sitting on a train, enigmatically said to a student of his something like: "here is the real movie". He meant, I think, that the train resembled the camera as a motion-based, drama-unfolding technology that transformed India.

It is actually in English only. The sign on the right has the English-language name of the station, "Whitechapel Station". Just happens to be English in Bengali script. I agree it's offensive and should be changed - to sādāgirjā ghāmṭi সাদাগির্জা ঘাঁটি (that would be Bengali)

I've been covering the Berlin film festival, which happened alongside a federal election. Here were Germany's two parallel universes, one open and cosmopolitan, the other seeking to close itself off. My The New Statesman diary dispatched from Berlin: newstatesman.com/culture/film/2…

This is a beautiful essay by Tanjil Rashid on Lampedusa’s The Leopard, where novels come from, and the eternal attempt to reanimate fading pasts, today on the The New Statesman: newstatesman.com/culture/books/…

In the The New Statesman, my essay on The Leopard, the greatest Italian novel and still, all these years on, a guide to the caprices of history, to living (and thinking) through change, to revolution, to marriage, even to decolonisation and much else besides: newstatesman.com/culture/books/…

In 1960, EP Thompson was writing The Making of the English Working Class. Today, though, it's the "white" working class at issue. What lurks behind that shift from English to white and might it be the country's unmaking? My essay for the The New Statesman newstatesman.com/culture/books/…

Has Christianity regained the underground appeal of its earliest days? My essay in FT Weekend looks into the revival of a highly personalised spirituality, notably among Gen-Z, and what some recent writing about religion reveals about the phenomenon ft.com/content/944606…

The new turn to religion

The Phoenician Scheme reimagines the war-ravaged near east as a sunlit Levantine fantasia of cypress trees, fez hats, camel-riders and kitsch hotels. My The Guardian column on watching Wes Anderson's nostalgic colonial visions amid the devastation of Gaza. theguardian.com/film/2025/jun/…

This is a wonderful analysis by Tanjil Rashid : "The Phoenician Scheme may at once be Anderson’s worst and most profound film, a beautifully textured engagement with the past, and an almost morally repugnant retreat from the present." Exactly!!! theguardian.com/film/2025/jun/…

This is a wonderful piece, by a wonderful writer ⁦Tanjil Rashid⁩ “7/7 changed life for British Muslims forever.” newstatesman.com/politics/socie…

7/7 was twenty years ago today. In my column for the The New Statesman, I reflect on how the London bombings reshaped British cultural life and brought 'the Muslim' to the centre of its discourse. newstatesman.com/politics/socie…

For all the scholars of my prose style out there, this was, for the record, intentional

I began musing on 7/7 in the British-Muslim experience after reading Staying Mute, Sara's terrific essay for The London Magazine about a Muslim survivor of the bombings, but also--via Primo Levi--about the way trauma is processed, consumed and narrated thelondonmagazine.org/article/essay-…

Enjoyed discussing the “death of English literature” with James Marriott and Tanjil Rashid on the The New Statesman podcast podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/is-…