Classical Music
Finnish on a high note
Now, how the Helsinki has this happened?
Surprise and tension
Czech Songs: Magdalena Kozena (Pentatone)
Well-behaved Beethoven
Beethoven: Triple concerto and British folksongs (Decca)
Polish strings
Grazyna Bacewicz: Symphonies 3 &4; Concerto for string orchestra (both on Chandos)
The glorious Ninth
Relive the moments when music changed forever
Word pictures at a gallery
Paintings are appreciated best when there are few people around to spoil the view
Musical no man’s lands
Two violin concertos fail to inspire
Against the relegation of Record Review
Why is Radio 3 mistreating one of its greatest assets?
A discordant song
Classical music may be the worst casualty of identitarian politics
The love that dare not speak its name
Classical music has been tarnished with the dread word “elitism”
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
Why they hated Ann Widdecombe
Fair-minded people could agree or disagree with her opinions. Left-wing bigots hated her for not abandoning them
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
The decline of British food culture
The products of social media virality and high street homogenisation leave the ambitious diner as cold as a neglected jacket potato
Wrestling with realignment
Labour will use the Irish Sea border as an excuse to realign with the EU’s rules
Today Havering, tomorrow Westminster
The local elections exposed a political class united mainly by its inability to feel embarrassment
The case for compromise with Cuba
The strategic case for negotiating with Havana
What’s in a name?
Britain’s debate over assisted suicide is being conducted in language designed to obscure what is actually proposed
A failed war on fags
The black market has taken over the tobacco trade Down Under
A profound Tory
Simon Heffer’s biography of Enoch Powell very much deserves revisiting
The last ponies on the moor
Dartmoor Ponies are facing an extinction event, thanks to a government Quango
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
A memo crying in the wilderness
Why does the Church of England now sound like an HR department?
QAnon for centrist dads
Peter Chappell’s What If Reform Wins is less a political forecast than a Westminster panic attack in novel form