The Critic

The Critic is Britain’s new monthly magazine for politics, ideas, art, literature and much more. Co-edited by Michael Mosbacher and Christopher Montgomery, The Critic exists to push back against a self-regarding and dangerous consensus that finds critical voices troubling, triggering, insensitive and disrespectful. The point is not provocation or trolling. The point of honest criticism is to better approach truth, not deny its possibility.

Ossified thought and a lack of intellectual rigour are depressing features of all sides of today’s political and cultural debate. Our writers will subscribe to no editorial line nor serve the interests of any party, faction or cause. We ask them to write because we expect them to be honest, and lucidly so. Look to our contributors and fault us if they are not. 

Contributors to the magazine include Jonathan Meades, Douglas Murray, Nick Cohen, Joshua Rozenberg, Anne McElvoy, Norman Lebrecht, Daniel Johnson, Lisa Hilton, Hannah Betts and Artists in Residence Adam Dant and Miriam Elia.

The April issue of The Critic features a Spring Music Special: Alexandra Wilson sets out a plan to rescue university music departments, Robert Thicknesse admires Handel’s “song-and-dance” contemporaries, Norman Lebrecht doubts arts centres have a future, Paul Lay bemoans Radio 3’s loss of authority, and Haydn Middleton is still crazy after all these years for Paul Simon. Also, John Self admires David Lodge’s highbrow contribution to lowbrow farces, Yuan Yi Zhu enters the “two tier justice” row, John Wilson Foster questions Ireland’s occupation of the moral high ground, Toby Young argues football doesn’t need a regulator, Ellen Pasternack tries to find an affordable London flat-share, and Stephen Bayley is charmed by Sixties Chelsea’s great design survivor, George Ciancimino.