Gallery Review
Frans Hals’ sense of fun
A delightful display of portraiture at the National Gallery
Growth, grift and speculation
What can art tell us about economics?
Polish lessons for Ukrainian reconstruction
What can the Ukrainians learn from post-war Warsaw?
The grievance industry
Ostentatious victimhood can be a comfortable gig
The Sagan standard
Liverpool’s Biennial rhetoric forgets about art
Down with skool
When will we stop herding unwilling children into an academic schooling many of them don’t want or need?
What survives of love
A splendid exhibition explores the history of romance
The dark side of Constable
His paintings have greater depth than fashion has supposed
The sacred and the profane
Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum
So close, so far
Pilvi Takala’s breaching experiments
Brussels, capital city of Surrealism
In Brussels, Surrealism lurks in the most unexpected places
Leaving Kindland, entering reality
“Being kind” at the expense of truth and reason can make us nothing of the kind
Sunak, false equivalence and the phantom far right
There is no comparison between the threat of Islamism and the threat of the far right
Therapy is making children ill
What would really help children’s mental health is talk about resilience
Whisperings of the cruel sea
Britten: Concertos (Orfeo)
Death by a thousand regulations
British politicians are allowing unnecessary laws to ruin civil society
The great immigration data disaster
Officials are deleting the data we need for a more sensible debate
Music for a warm bath
Bloch, Bruch, Dohnanyi (Claves)
Britain is still safe for Jews
It may be far from perfect — but where would be safer?
The Boy who never grew old
Eric Ravilious’s ethereal watercolours chime with today’s sensibilities
Big beasts versus the Bible
Darwin sidelined the Creator by documenting the slow mechanisms of evolution
