Issue: April 2024
Consider the way of the tiger
We should learn lessons from Japan as we start to face our own demographic crunch
The love that dare not speak its name
Classical music has been tarnished with the dread word “elitism”
Singers have a voice, too
Study of the Western canon is often reduced to a politicised debate: power and patronage versus individual genius. The truth is far more complex
Finding the middle ground
Where do the acts too big for pubs but too small for arenas play?
God save The Kinks
How did four ornery lads rearing up from the post-war English underclass become national treasures?
“Problematic” art
This kind of adolescent tripe passes these days for thought
And the band played on
Cash crisis in the arts — what’s new?
Mirabel Chevenix
Grande dame
W.S. Gilbert
A wildly funny and slyly subversive comic genius who deftly skewered the mores of Victorian England
The sacred and the profane
Allowing a “Rave in the Nave” in Canterbury Cathedral was a regrettable error of judgement
Most Read
American strategy in Iran is wiser than it seems
President Trump’s intervention will leave the world safer than it was
Saint Nicola
Nicola Sturgeon wants sympathy for her husband’s crimes—but after years spent avoiding awkward questions, her latest reinvention may be the hardest sell yet.
The lonely death of Henry Nowak
We must draw lessons from a horrendous and disgraceful case
Rewatching the English
English identity has become too surreal and discomfiting to define
A failed war on fags
The black market has taken over the tobacco trade Down Under
On a wind and a prayer
Beggaring ourselves will not cool the rest of the planet’s weather
English football is not boring
Greater competition is being confused with dullness
Pricing out the young
Britain’s labour market is faltering, and subsidies cannot mask the policies pricing young workers out.
Will Spain become a Protestant country?
How immigration is changing the religious dynamics of a traditional Catholic stronghold
Women who play along …
It’s only natural when you come across the aftermath of a collision to wonder who was to blame.
Truth and consequences for ministers
Former Ministers should be hauled back before MPs to justify their poor decisions
AI, religion and AI religion
Pope Leo is right to push back against the prophets of AI supremacy and AI doom
Better Slayyyter than never
Like the first Strokes album if Max Martin had produced it
Defending liberalism from its defenders
Liberalism should mean anything but a more interventionist state
The emperor’s new AI
A satirical X account is doing what the media class has failed to do, and report on the great AI delusion
Outside the box
why traditional topiary is
making a comeback