The Critics
The malicious and the mad
Two recent productions offer two different perspectives on dark sides of masculinity
Zurbarán on Freud’s couch
An acclaimed new exhibition is full of overwrought symbolism and compositional failures
Restoration romps
Purcell, The Musical, OSO Arts Centre, Barnes
The chairwoman of the board
A story driven at a whip-crack pace, pulsing with manic energy and nail-biting
Piano pair strike just the right note
Serendipity has delivered a double bill for the ages this month
Better Slayyyter than never
Like the first Strokes album if Max Martin had produced it
Beauty from the ruins of war
Painting gave artists and their viewers a temporary way out of the grim wartime reality
The Boston barbarians
The Boston Symphony acted like a New Orleans nightclub owner with a recalcitrant pole-dancer
These violent delights
Pagliacci made the murder the true apex of the show
Spaceships, ghost ships and sheep
The secret sauce of Project Hail Mary: it’s a laugh
Most Read
The martyrdom of Young Bob
On ebbing power of the political influencer
Grooming gangs and the truth
We should not give ammunition to deniers of the grooming gangs scandal
Babies need women
Leaving children with only men who are not their parents is foolish and dangerous
Stop ignoring the Islamisation of our democracy
The British state is bending to Islamism, not attempting to defeat it
Losing control of the narrative
The British establishment no longer sets the terms of public debate over migration
Woke politics was never trivial
Wokeness was a lot more, and a lot worse, than a passing online fad
Strange new world
A new art history hinges on a proleptic reading of Edwardian history
Lost in translation
Attempting to understand the lives and thought of our ancestors can teach us about ourselves
Polish piano
Andre Tchaikowsky: Piano concertos (Ondine)
Fence-sitting in a time of peril
Daniel Johnson condemns the Prime
Minister’s impotent handwringing when
America called for help in the Iran war
Crushing the real progressives
The Islamic Republic of Iran, now under fire from the demonic West, is the most progressive society on earth
Marketing masters
Catching the eye of a buyer in the social media era
Drill, baby, drill
We need Cornish lithium and tin just as much as North Sea oil — whatever the nimbys say
Publishing has an AI problem
From reviews to actual books, creativity is being outsourced to machines
Tony Blair cannot escape politics
And our politics cannot escape from Tony Blair
All the single ladies
Instead of trying to persuade reluctant women into motherhood, policymakers should focus on helping enthusiastic parents have larger families