Classical Music
Verdi shines, despite everything
A gloomy production of a glittering opera
Gustav Mahler: 5th symphony (Pentatone)
Its ethos in Mahler remains inimitable
Franz Schubert: String quintet/Quartettsatz (Chandos)
Intimations of life’s fragility
Jean Sibelius: Orchestral songs (LAWO)
The themes are cruel and cold
Alban Berg: Violin concerto &c. (Chandos)
A stunning marriage of the tragic and the erotic
Prokofiev, Tcherepnin: The Bark of Yearning (Avi-music)
This is prime Prokofiev
John Adams: Slonimsky’s Earbox (Alpha)
Among his best work
John Cage: Four Walls (Fuga Libera)
More than a little bit mad
Bach in town
We need more classical music in public spaces
Does vaping do more harm than good?
It seems improbable
War, peace and city streets
How English towns survived the Blitz and entered the modern world
Bursting the myth of the “people’s war”
The Home Guard was not a nation-in-arms of the Jacobin kind
Is “progressive realism” either?
Weighing up the rights and wrongs of the Lammy Doctrine
The Critic
No they haven’t put the mag on the silver screen just yet, but its still worth watching
The meaning of depoliticisation
How the establishment made political questions unanswerable
Office politics
There’s the joker, the slacker, and the bloke who just got fired
Gambling gifts
New reports on Labour and political donations miss the point
Mental illness is more complex than we think
There are no easy answers when it comes to mental health
Izzy Hardcastle
Ornament of the book-world
The grim quasi-religious doctrine of “unconscious bias training”
Baroness Royall’s commitment to the idea should concern Oxford students, academics and administrators
