Album
Indulgent Italian treats
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Complete string quartets (Naxos)
Illicit fun
Jonathan Leibowitz: Eastern Reflections (Delphian)
Great big rain showers
C Schumann/Grieg: Piano concertos (Signum)
Anger and intuition
Mieczyslaw Weinberg: String quartets 6, 13, 15 (Chandos)
Schoenberg’s morning and night
Arnold Schoenberg: Expressionist Music (Orchid)
Too measured for its own good
Lukas Foss: 1st symphony &c (Naxos)
Peers but not equals
Ferdinand Ries: Symphonies 1&2 (Ondine); Franz Clement: Solo violin works (Naxos)
Surprise and tension
Czech Songs: Magdalena Kozena (Pentatone)
Well-behaved Beethoven
Beethoven: Triple concerto and British folksongs (Decca)
Playfulness and tedium
Stravinsky, Petrushka; Debussy, Jeux and Prelude (Decca)
Don’t bite the hand that feeds the birds
The government’s flawed biodiversity analysis endangers successful state-funded schemes
Tierless? (Starmer’s version)
Taxpayer-funded escorts for celebrities, criminal neighbours for normal Brits
Donald Trump should not heed the call of foreign policy hawks
The world is not split neatly between good guys and bad guys
How long can Ireland’s gender equality hold?
A gender divide in voting is not as clear as in other countries — but that could change
Bants means bans
Scarcely any football chants will be allowed under Labour’s new “equality” rules
The kindest of ghosts
A new history of childhood reading is a treasure
Why Ukraine almost certainly cannot win
And why the war is likely to continue anyway
“Bold vision”
An action or choice can perfectly well be bold without being good
Murders for November
Another mélange of murders, from Japan to Scotland
The death of conservatism?
Individually and collectively, we must choose life
Blue-collar brilliance
1970s Pittsburgh wasn’t just a steel town: it was the steel town
