A heavyweight companion for life
Music’s vast dismembered brocade enchants practitioners and listeners alike
Wagner: the long and short of it
Creativity consists in destruction, in turning the composer inside-out, in making fun of him.
Brahms: sublime genius on a major scale
Forget the sneering of Benjamin Britten, for whom Brahms’s music was “ugly and foul”, the German composer and pianist was a virtuoso talent whose best works burn with volcanic passion and seriousness of purpose
The sound of love
Robert Schumann expresses the intense passion and despair of true love better than any other composer
Most Read
Tame Impala fails to impress
unconquered by a
taste of Crusader food
Gary Stevenson is wrong about wealth taxes
The popular economist is irritating, but more importantly he is mistaken
What is wrong now was wrong before
Julia Gillard should not pretend that the “unintended consequences” of the gender debate were unknowable
Why they hated Ann Widdecombe
Fair-minded people could agree or disagree with her opinions. Left-wing bigots hated her for not abandoning them
Ethnic minorities are abandoning Labour
It is not just Muslim voters who have been abandoning the Labour Party
No, rent controls don’t work
Stop toying with failed ideas and build some damn houses
Herodotus and the birth of enquiry
Before there were historians, there was Herodotus — a wandering Greek determined to discover why civilisations rise and fall
A Laboured response
Keir Starmer and his advocates are all out of ideas
What is anger for?
If young women are going to be radical, they need to make it worth it
Brave new world or fools’ paradise?
For Dubai’s quarter of a million British expats, the Iran war is a mere blip in a luxurious lifestyle
Embers to tend
The brilliance of Sappho has been obscured by rumour and neglect
It’s high time we banned dogs
The tide is turning against these slobbering beasts
The testing of Giorgia Meloni
Italy’s first woman PM has proved a pragmatic conservative who has brought stability to her country
Babies need women
Leaving children with only men who are not their parents is foolish and dangerous
The torment and the tourists
Holiday-makers must stop enabling the abuse of horses in Egypt
Ant & Dec: heroically bland
Clear separation between private and public selves is faintly refreshing