Feminist rehab for mean girl Mahler
You’d have thought the Head Muse of old Vienna had enough on her plate
The Lost Gardens of London
The war between city and greenery is eternal; the concrete and asphalt seeks open land to engulf
Tawdry tales
The Tales of Hoffmann, Royal Opera House
Booze or muse?
Composers have been no slouches when it comes to the sauce
Gothic staging
The Turn of the Screw, Coliseum
Why can’t there be more vampires?
Bloodsucking, in various more or less metaphorical guises, is after all opera’s happiest place
Less than the sum of its parts
Eugene Onegin, Royal Opera
Borientalism
Madama Butterfly, Opera Ballet Flanders, Antwerp
Good, mostly clean, fun
The Boys from Syracuse, Upstairs at the Gatehouse
Magic moments
A bomb dropped into the frightful world of mid-Victorian musical entertainment
BoJo’s Life of Johnson
Exclusive extracts of perhaps the best autobiography by a former Conservative prime minister called Boris
Afrocentrism with a Labour twist
Dawn Butler’s Black History Month video was disturbing as well as weird
The Warburg refurbished
The institute used to feel intellectually introverted
The blessings on our doorsteps
It is all too easy to forget the astonishing cultural wealth that lies close to hand in our medieval parish churches
We must resurrect the symphony
Or the orchestra will die with it
Food for thoughtlessness
The march of the public health puritans continues
The dam of Spanish eco-politics creaks
Will no death toll make elites reconsider green overreach?
Labour is killing British farming
Attacks on British agriculture must be resisted
Donald Trump is a wake-up call for Europe
We cannot complacently depend on the US
The grim quasi-religious doctrine of “unconscious bias training”
Baroness Royall’s commitment to the idea should concern Oxford students, academics and administrators
Labour’s economic policies are incoherent
Labour risks collapsing under the weight of its own inner economic contradictions
