Culture
Clearly raising the tone
What makes the perfect radio voice?
Reynaldo Hahn: Poèmes & Valses (Hyperion)
This unfamiliar collection is the most enjoyable piano album of the year so far
Literary festivals: sheer hell in a tent
To make people laugh for an hour is good business sense — but it says nothing about writing, or creativity, or art
Evening Vespas and Gelato alla Gordon’s
When in Florence…
Cancelled at Cannes
Sidelining the creator of a national movement is pure, unashamed revisionism
Three act tragedy
The Wagatha Christie case reveals the addictive fun of gossip — but also its corrosive power
An unlikely man of the people
Kenneth Clark has been unfairly accused of elitism; he wanted to democratise the glories of Western art and make it available to all
Pipe down and play up
We need more silence in sport
Bring on the big beasts
Music needs heavyweight champions to stand up for truth and excellence
Gustav Mahler: 4th symphony (Pentatone)
A new recording of Mahler’s smallest symphony is “indispensable” to connoisseurs of his music
Dissolve the hotbeds of wokery
Failing universities should go the way of the monasteries under Henry VIII
Soporific Starmer
The Prime Minister appears to be making a virtue of his own dullness
Why won’t Chris Whitty go away?
He lingers on — a slap-headed Rasputin whispering terrible ideas into the ears of our leaders
The half-forgotten promise of the Jubilee Line
The London Underground line points the way towards a better future
Tough women take on the bad guys
When it comes to spy dramas and domestic angst, less is very definitely more
The death of an Anglo-Hungarian Painting
Nine months after a savage act of vandalism at Trinity College Cambridge, anger is growing at its lacklustre response
Look on our works, ye voters, and despair
Nothing beside remains except the colossal wreck of the Tory Party
A constructive opposition
The age of Badenoch is off to a suitably farcical start
Ageing gracelessly?
A new book on care is filled with empirical insights but short on rhetorical power
The death of conservatism?
Individually and collectively, we must choose life
Resist Labour’s managerial revolution
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are grimly committed to expanding the state and entrenching bureaucracy
