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
Gelding: the pros
Bring back the castratos? Might as well
Revolution in the air
Andrea Chénier, Royal Opera House
Bedlam bingo
Sex, death, sado-masochism and blasphemy in a heady cocktail
Lucia di Lammermoor, Royal Opera House
It’s an amazing paradox that something as tawdry as opera can produce such a pure expression of what it is to be human
We are the cultural Norns
Here, at last, is a mind-expanding podcast that is the antidote to everything the wretched Arts Council stands for
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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
Ethnic minorities are abandoning Labour
It is not just Muslim voters who have been abandoning the Labour Party
How to fix the economy
A repentant ex-financial trader tells all
The torment and the tourists
Holiday-makers must stop enabling the abuse of horses in Egypt
What difference does he make?
Andy Burnham is not the answer to our woes because Burnhamism is not replicable
The right does not need religion
We should not mourn the end of the Quiet Revival
The meaning of Zack Polanski
The icon of geriatric millennials is one of life’s drifters
Taking the Sheen off
Shiny old lies remain the very bedrock of our trade
Britain should speak up for Egypt’s persecuted Christians
We should oppose blasphemy laws at home and abroad
Angst in the Anglosphere
England’s existential crisis is being played out at the World Cup
California dying
The world’s dream factory now produces scenes from a dystopia
A memo crying in the wilderness
Why does the Church of England now sound like an HR department?
The great HR survivors
As the DEI era fades, personnel heads live on as senior CEO consiglieri and hatchet-bearers
The radical feminism—Christianity pipeline
For radical feminists, clarity about the realities of sex often opens onto a search for moral order