Its contributors have included John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, Christopher Hitchens, and Paul Johnson.

The New Statesman was founded in 1913 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb with the support of George Bernard Shaw and other prominent members of the Fabian Society.

The chairman of The Nation and Athenaeum's board was the economist John Maynard Keynes, who came to be an important influence on the newly merged paper, which started with a circulation of just under 13,000.

[15] After the 1938 Anschluss, Martin wrote: "Today if Mr. Chamberlain would come forward and tell us that his policy was really one not only of isolation but also of Little Englandism in which the Empire was to be given up because it could not be defended and in which military defence was to be abandoned because war would totally end civilization, we for our part would wholeheartedly support him.

[17] In a 17 September 1932 editorial, the magazine accused the British Conservative press of misrepresenting the Soviet Union's agricultural policy but added that "the serious nature of the food situation is no secret and no invention".

[17] In 1938 came Martin's refusal to publish George Orwell's celebrated dispatches from Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War because they criticised the communists for suppressing the anarchists and the left-wing Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM).

"It is an unfortunate fact", Martin wrote to Orwell, "that any hostile criticism of the present Russian regime is liable to be taken as propaganda against socialism".

The young Labour MP Richard Crossman, who had become an assistant editor of the magazine before the war, was Martin's chief lieutenant in this period, and the Statesman published Keep Left, the pamphlet written by Crossman, Michael Foot and Ian Mikardo, that most succinctly laid out the Labour left's proposals for a "third force" foreign policy rather than alliance with the United States.

[23][24][25] There was much less focus on a single political line in the back part of the paper, which was devoted to book reviews and articles on cultural topics.

Martin retired in 1960 and was replaced as editor by John Freeman, a politician and journalist who had resigned from the Labour government in 1951 along with Bevan and Harold Wilson.

[27][28] After Johnson's departure in 1970, the Statesman went into a long period of declining circulation under successive editors: Richard Crossman (1970–72), who tried to edit it at the same time as playing a major role in Labour politics; Anthony Howard (1972–78), whose recruits to the paper included Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and James Fenton (surprisingly, the arch anti-Socialist Auberon Waugh was writing for the Statesman at this time before returning to The Spectator); Bruce Page (1978–82), who moved the paper towards specialising in investigative journalism, sacking Arthur Marshall, who had been writing for the Statesman on and off since 1935, as a columnist, allegedly because of the latter's support for Margaret Thatcher; Hugh Stephenson (1982–86), under whom it took a strong position again for unilateral nuclear disarmament; John Lloyd (1986–87), who swung the paper's politics back to the centre; Stuart Weir (1987–90), under whose editorship the Statesman founded the Charter 88 constitutional reform pressure group; and Steve Platt (1990–96).

Following Steve Platt's resignation, Robinson appointed a former editor of The Independent, Ian Hargreaves, on what was at the time an unprecedentedly high salary.

Hargreaves fired most of the left-wingers on the staff and turned the Statesman into a strong supporter of Tony Blair's leadership of the Labour Party.

In 2002, for example, the periodical was accused of antisemitism when it published an investigative cover story on the power of the "Zionist lobby" in Britain, under the title "A Kosher Conspiracy?

[37] During Wilby's seven-year tenure, the New Statesman moved from making a financial loss to having a good operating profit, though circulation only remained steady at around 23,000.

[49] As of 2020, the New Statesman considers itself a "print-digital hybrid" with peak online traffic of more than 4 million unique visitors per month, almost a four-fold increase since 2011.

"In increasingly tribal times, Jason Cowley continues to champion independence of thought and diversity of opinion, challenging his audience and producing a magazine that's imaginative, unpredictable and interesting", the BSME judges said on presenting the award.

[51] The magazine's Spotlight series (which publishes specialist business content) also won the Launch of the Year award, with judges describing the supplements as a "great example of monetising a brand without losing its integrity".

She wrote in a Mail on Sunday article: "New Statesman fiercely opposed the Iraq war and yet now hands over the reins to someone key in orchestrating that conflict".

The issue included a previously unpublished poem[57] by Ted Hughes, "Last letter", describing what happened during the three days leading up to the suicide of his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath.

The issue featured a series of exclusives including the actor Hugh Grant's secret recording[58] of former News of the World journalist Paul McMullan, and a much-commented-on[59] interview[60] with Liberal Democrat leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, in which Clegg admitted that he "cries regularly to music" and that his nine-year-old son asked him, "'Why are the students angry with you, Papa?'"

The issue included the writer Christopher Hitchens's final interview,[61] conducted by Dawkins in Texas, and pieces by Bill Gates, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Philip Pullman.

In October 2012 the magazine was guest-edited by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei[62] and, for the first time, published simultaneously in Mandarin (in digital form) and English.

As well as writing that week's editorial,[63] Ai Weiwei interviewed the Chinese civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng,[64] who fled to the United States after exposing the use of compulsory abortions and sterilisations.

The issue was launched on 19 October 2012 at the Lisson Gallery in London,[65] where speakers including artist Anish Kapoor and lawyer Mark Stephens paid tribute to Ai Weiwei.

[citation needed] The former British prime minister Gordon Brown guest-edited the magazine in 2016, a special edition exploring Britain's relationship with Europe ahead of the EU referendum.