Album Review
Over-simplified and underpowered
Shostakovich symphonies 2, 3, 12, 13 (DG)
Flickering with fire and ice
Beethoven: 1st piano concerto, &c (DG)
The world’s last measured moments
Joseph Haydn: Symphonies 93-95
A chronicle of gratitude and ambivalence
Mieczyslaw Weinberg: 12th symphony/Dawn (Chandos)
The ultimate collaborator
Sergio Tiempo: Hommage (Avanti)
The end of the Emersons
Infinite Voyage: Emerson Quartet (Alpha Classics)
Immense energies
Grazyna Bacewicz: Piano concertos &c (Ondine)
An epochal violinist
Eugene Ysaye: Solo violin sonatas (Deutsche Grammophon)
Too formal for the pub
Mr Händel im pub: Baroque meets folk (Arcantus)
Unenticing overtures
Rautavaara: 3rd piano concerto (Bis); Overtures from Finland (Chandos)
The problem with puberty blockers
Ministers must step in to prevent the NHS from experimenting on children
Weak, flawed, limited; an opportunity missed
Sanghera really should have devoted more attention to the pre-Western history in Empireworld
How to lose an empire
The rise and fall of the Sassoon family, whose yearning for social acceptance brought titles at the cost of success
Death by a thousand regulations
British politicians are allowing unnecessary laws to ruin civil society
How Britain fell in love with cars
From Wind in the Willows to Wodehouse, cars captured the imagination
Young people are not as pro-immigration as you think
The idea that young people are uniformly “woke” is a silly myth
Best bets for Cheltenham
My racing tips for Cheltenham
There is a lushness to this expanded Letters
There is frequent reporting of local news, often betraying a hobbit-like
preoccupation with the availability of beer
Learning in the round
Spreading fingers over a globe, not pinching them on a screen, is the best way to answer questions
The worm (re)turns
Dune: Part Two is in cinemas — and it’s more of the glorious same
Grimdull
The fantasy genre is afflicted by a dull and tedious obsession with adolescent cynicism, prurient scenes and one dimensional anti-heroes
