Album Review
Wit as well as social conscience
Avril Quartet: Claires Obscures (Etcetera)
Pleasure and persuasion
Jean Sibelius: Symphonies 1-7 (Ondine)
All the Mendelssohn you will ever need
Mendelssohn: Symphonies and Oratorios (Deutsche Grammophon)
Confessions of an aging pop queen
Madonna once assured us that being an adult woman was something to aspire to
Joyous genre-bending
Milestones (Signum Classics)
Two faces of America
Copland: 3rd symphony, Walker 5th (LSO Live)
Talent and temptation
William Walton: Two symphonies
A bore and a balm
Inferno: Behzod Abdurimov (Alpha Classics)
Standout singers
If Music (Erato), Day of These Days (Delphian) & Eisnacht (Genuin)
Alkan the Awesome
Alkan: Complete organ works, vol. 1 (Signum Classics)
Most Read
Tame Impala fails to impress
unconquered by a
taste of Crusader food
Gary Stevenson is wrong about wealth taxes
The popular economist is irritating, but more importantly he is mistaken
What is wrong now was wrong before
Julia Gillard should not pretend that the “unintended consequences” of the gender debate were unknowable
Ethnic minorities are abandoning Labour
It is not just Muslim voters who have been abandoning the Labour Party
How to fix the economy
A repentant ex-financial trader tells all
Zack Polanski’s war on carrots
Cheap food is not evidence of exploitation but of competition — something Adam Smith understood long before Zack Polanski
The man who knew too little
Faced with Mandelson, Starmer offers a bold defence: he didn’t know, and that’s what makes him blameless
Life for petty theft?
IPP sentences are a shocking stain on the criminal justice system that the Prime Minister would do well to kill off
QAnon for centrist dads
Peter Chappell’s What If Reform Wins is less a political forecast than a Westminster panic attack in novel form
Andy Burnham’s immigration double game
Andy Burnham might make sceptical noises about mass migration but they mean nothing in practice
Peeves and a weekend in Worcester
Thoroughly entertaining, darkly funny and humanely nasty
Spaceships, ghost ships and sheep
The secret sauce of Project Hail Mary: it’s a laugh
The global migration compact trap
The UN migration compact may be non-binding, but its political effects are very real
The tears of Keir’s
It was an anticlimactic end to an unconvincing premiership
No Keirs, only dreams now
With the prime minister on his way out, even his own MPs have discovered a fondness for him
Kemi always gets it right
Whatever the crisis, the Conservative leader invariably discovers that events have vindicated her.