Monarchy
Recasting the Crown for modern Britain
This progressive historian’s real charge against the monarchic institution is one of “complacency”
Common prayer
Britain, and her monarchy, have a language fitted for times of joy and sorrow alike — so why does the Church of England make such poor use of our traditional liturgy?
The abdication of responsibility
A monarch quitting undercuts the point of the institution they represent
Satan’s sedition
Liberty, license and Milton’s multifaceted allegory for Oliver Cromwell
Music fit for a king
The cliché of Britain as “the land without music” was disproved
Coronation in high definition
Confronting the mysteries of a sacred institution
Ghosts of British life
Remembering a forgotten past
Coronation sceptical
Against the tyranny of twee
Pray for the republicans
Rejoice in the sheer religiosity of the Coronation. It places the King above the political fray
Compulsory coronation?
Guardian columnists can’t stop telling us how little they care
Impressive yet unmoving
Franz Schmidt: 4 symphonies (Naxos)
When America ignored a slaughter
Whatever America’s flaws, its absence from the global stage leaves a space quickly filled by far more malevolent actors
What’s wrong with the Human Rights Act?
It makes judges the arbiter of moral and political as well as legal decisions
Cities of the mind
19th century English towns live on in our collective imagination
Was Houellebecq right?
Reassessing the French novelist vilified for forecasting the Islamicisation of France
Confessions of a Melbourne Bus-Fare Evader
I am become bus, destroyer of bourgeois class consciousness
The Critic guide to glass ceilings
On the self-made men (and women!) of the Labour Party
Dancing with Beethoven
Beethoven: String Quartets, vol.2 (Chandos)
The problem with Rachel Reeves’s pension pretensions
Bigger funds are not the key to effective investments
A dark day for Australian women
It takes more than a document to prove that you are female
Making a difference
Over the past five years we’ve been keeping things civilised
