The Critics
Russell Beale on song as Bach
How the paternal gorgon finally attracts our empathy, waging a last intellectual battle
Savour the silence
The first duty of a conductor is to imagine a world without noise
Raging irritants
Knowing Rage Against the Machine are political doesn’t overcome my determination to enjoy them anyway
Out of Africa
To get a handle on African cinema, watch Mandabi
Press Gang
Croatia’s war runs like a dark thread through the excellent series ‘The Paper’
Auntie Nazi League
It’s BBC actors and comedy stars who’ve made the corporation great over the years — not two-a-penny journalists
Original sin
Robert Thicknesse on the woes of modern, British opera
The pain gain
In today’s pop world trauma is an asset
Full of Eastern promise
Out with the old, in with the new: Michael Prodger on art collection trends
Catholic tastes
Christopher Silvester on films of faith and the canonisation of three children’s divine visions
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
The RAM should face the music
Why the Royal Academy of Music shuts of pupils from private schools
Keep the state out of sex
Bureaucracy should not be allowed into the bedroom
Class war in the upper house
The end of the Lords’ ancient
right to resolve peerage disputes
is the latest casualty of Labour’s
constitutional vandalism
Taking the Sheen off
Shiny old lies remain the very bedrock of our trade
We have to tame Big Tech
We must act to regulate social media before it does a lot more damage
The slow vibe shift
Escaping our “post-cultural state” will not happen overnight
The fateful road to the great dictators
Weimar Germany / Red Dawn Over China
The problem with optimisation
Feeling maximally healthy and productive is not the point of life
I don’t trust the British state
British institutions simply are not functioning in the interests of the people they are meant to serve
How the cranks won
Britain’s ruling ideology is founded less on what elites believe than on who they fear
Dumbed-down democracy
“Public opinion” is useless when the public is largely ignorant