The Critics
Divine trickery
Jephtha, Royal Opera House
Passionate subjectivity
La traviata, ENO, Coliseum
Resurrecting Lavery
The decline of Sir John Lavery’s reputation was undeserved
Does the Turner Prize still matter?
This year’s exhibition offers a diversity of style if not of ideology
Have I seen the future of music?
On a performance in three dimensions for all five senses
Missing the point
Why opera needs fictional dead women
Rock benediction
Make-Up gig is a matter of performance
A novel collector
The legacy left by art collector and novelist Hugh Walpole
Back to Blackstuff
The Boys from the Blackstuff hit the stage in Liverpool
My war stories
The role of the war film in British cinema
Don’t take the vapes!
Will there be no end to the government’s embrace of prohibitionism?
The ongoing fiasco of European defence
Starry-eyed talk of continental cooperation obscures the grim reality of competing interests
History will judge us on gender
How can the modern world tolerate such absurdity?
Beheading a pigeon
For all its quirks, bushcraft offered valuable insights into modernity and tradition
The meaningless models of “public health”
Another brick in the “public health” fortress of unreality
A masterpiece in miniature
Taneyev, Schumann: Piano quintets (Signum)
Attack is the best form of defence
The right cannot always be fighting a rearguard action in the culture wars
Resisting the gender Goliath
Why the Post Office story resonated with gender-critical feminists
The Midas touch
The kind of skill that makes the breath catch in thousands of throats at once
Ferrari and the terrible joy
Michael Mann’s Ferrari shows how ambiguity and contradiction fuels us
The shadowy economics of fentanyl
One professor is investigating how the deadly drug trade works — and how it might be fought
