Rabble-rouser in chief
Our increasingly polarised and angry age wants not entertainment, but preachers
Imagine John hadn’t died
It’s easy if you try
The myth of the Victorian Christmas
Our values today are of consumerism and instant gratification, inherited from our Victorian forebears
Bring back bawdiness
Bawdy humour and the pantomime go together like sausages and mash, whatever you make of that banger
The knife-wielding obituarist
Tom Sutcliffe’s obituary of composer Stephen Sondheim was ill-judged and vindictive
Male authors: the sun also sets
Give up writing, men – the world will be a happier place when you do
What happened to sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll?
Music today is anodyne compared to the heydays of Britpop and the sixties and seventies
John Saumarez Smith: a bibliophile and a gentleman
The Heywood Hill bookseller has died
Good-natured amateurishness
British musical theatre has nothing on the American slickness
Egotist ergo sum
Just stage Cyrano with a great actor breaking wind in a corner, and we’ll all be happy
The City’s lights are dimming
The Square Mile is increasingly at risk of becoming an irrelevance
Harry Potter and the bourgeois-bohemian dream
Looking back at the dreams and resentments of an ascendant class
The false prophets of war and turmoil
All eight of Whatmore’s subjects would have been astounded by the
stability of the British state through the 19th century
Death throes of a dictatorship?
Amid war and discontent, military rule in Myanmar is faltering
In praise of borrowed ideas
AI will not be the death of creativity, and could even enhance it
An unconvincing case against the UNRWA
It should take more evidence to strip the Palestinians of essential support
Scratches in the stonework of history
A new history of graffiti and rebellion is less light and bawdy than one may have expected
The court of hot air
We do not need human rights law to protect human rights or to maintain the rule of law
Sticky situation
Everyone’s Sticky Toffee Pudding recipe was different. All were revolting
Kilkenny’s golden age
A fascinating exploration of Irish history could have been better and more comprehensively illustrated
Devolution has been a disaster
SNP incompetence is a feature of the system and not a bug
