This week, Harry wants to know what you think Britain’s role in the world is, or should be. When he asked me this question over a (long, journalistic) lunch, the first thing that came to mind was John Milton. “Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live.” England went on to have a long and controversial career in testing out Milton’s assumption. It took a few centuries for the English to realise, or be forced into the realisation that other nations didn’t care for its tutelage. The old edition of this book includes 10 official SAT practice tests. If you get that version, you can practice your skills with the passage-based reading questions, which are still relevant today. This is the average number of seconds between one wave and the next, 1-2 miles out to sea. A long wave Top-down enforcement of experimental green schemes like 15-minute cities and low-traffic neighbourhoods are revealing just how weird the British are, argues Clive Martin .

Good morning, and welcome to the Saturday Read, the New Statesman ’s weekly guide to the best writing on ideas, politics, books and culture. This is Will . We have a superb selection of reportage, interviews and comment pieces for you this weekend. As British politics heads towards an election, and the rhetoric escalates, a banal reality is revealing itself: Labour and the Tories are moving closer together. There is, George Eaton writes this week, a quiet consensus developing between the parties. Policies that were once dismissed by the right as Marxist are now announced in Tory budgets, as Jeremy Hunt showed this week. Both parties are accepting of a bigger state, of Brexit, of clamping down on crime. Is political radicalism dead? Though she is no longer a merry wife of Westminster, Sasha Swire is well-placed to review Cleo Watson’s debut novel, Whips , a sex-farce that nods and winks towards the seamier side of high-politics. This is the average height of the waves, 1-2 miles out to sea. The height of the waves can vary. The Lily Lynch reports from Belgrade, where an influx of Russian émigrés is changing Serbia. Displacement due to war, Lynch writes, is something Serbians know all too well. WLAnoosh explains how Britain became a country that never has enough time.“As a nation we are spending less time seeing our friends, eating at restaurants, going out, exercising and volunteering.”

John Gray’s interesting review of Milan Kundera’s book ( The Critics, 14 April) fails to mention Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who would have agreed with Kundera that “there is no living culture in Europe, and its posterity inhabits a void created by the disappearance of any supreme values”. Good morning, and welcome to the Saturday Read, the New Statesman ’s weekly guide to the very best writing on ideas, politics, books and culture. This is Will Lloyd . Harry has posed this week’s question in today’s sign-off. We have eight pieces up front from the New Statesman , 15 links to pieces from across the media, and then a handful of other NS articles you might like. If you’re in Cambridge today, the New Statesman will be out in force at the city’s 20th annual Literary Festival . If you work on understanding your mistakes on questions that closely resemble the ones on the real test, you'll be on your way to a great SAT Reading score!

What to Know

New Yorker : Inside Hillsdale College . American conservatives are much better at building institutions than their UK counterparts. HL — Tina Brown, the editor who created the modern Vanity Fair and went on to edit the New Yorker , has written this week’s NS diary. She makes two intriguing comparisons, between King Charles and his mother, and between Donald Trump and Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber – “McVeigh didn’t find his army… because he didn’t have social media.” Trump, who was indicted this week on felony charges, does. Good morning, and welcome to the Saturday Read, the New Statesman ’s guide to the best writing on ideas, politics, books and culture each weekend. This is Will Lloyd. The Saturday Read’s editor, Harry Lambert, has posed this week’s question in today’s sign-off. We have eight pieces up front from the New Statesman , 15 links to pieces from across the media, and then a handful of other NS articles you might like. Julius West was only 26 when he wrote this piece for us in the weeks after the October Revolution. He filed from Petrograd, the newly renamed city of his birth, St Petersburg. The piece is full of the wry energy of a journalist on the ground, so I thought to share it with you in our anniversary week. It’s one of the earlier pieces of reportage we published. (Will is away this week, reporting on the ground elsewhere.) Lewis died a year later during the Spanish flu pandemic.