On Opera
Revolution in the air
Andrea Chénier, Royal Opera House
Bedlam bingo
Sex, death, sado-masochism and blasphemy in a heady cocktail
Loony tunes
Opera begs leave to celebrate lunacy in a different way
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
Off with the fairies
Unsurprisingly, the most brilliant of all English music-theatre pieces are mostly overlooked
Poor old Carmen
This update of a classic from the Royal Opera House is a reminder of why messing with great pieces is so risky
The grand tour
Sex and the cities
Operettas for the apocalypse
As we career merrily ever deeper into the end-times, what is the appropriate soundtrack for civilisational collapse?
High art or high camp?
Elektra, Royal Opera House
Goodnight Vienna
A new Austrian musical taps dark material to produce a brilliant, unsettling and darkly funny exploration of the Anschluss
The great migration
What will Twitter do without its smuggest inhabitants?
The esoterica trap
We should not pollute good causes with unreliable information
Bluesky thinking?
The honeymoon phase of the X alternative could be short-lived
Free speech is fascist
Words must be controlled to ensure that Starmer’s subjects behave themselves
Portugal and the missing goats
The roots of environmental disasters can be odder than they look
Sophocles’s lack-of-foresight saga
Families will feud, from the BC era to 2024
A Chancellor should be a fine thing
The University of Oxford’s Chancellor election has descended into farce
Labour is killing British farming
Attacks on British agriculture must be resisted
Why the Democrats cannot be populists
It goes against the managerial nature of the party
Making a difference
Over the past five years we’ve been keeping things civilised
Donald Trump and the age of sovereign internationalism
We are entering a new age of great power competition
