Music
Wartime hallelujah
Creativity amid conflict
Wagner rides again
A return to enchanted tradition in Siegfried at Longborough Festival Opera
The original, best and shortest English opera
John Blow, Venus and Adonis; Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas (HGO)
Henryk Mikolai Gorecki: Piano pieces (Accord)
A furious, unfiltered revelation of the experimental heart of a familiar composer
Pomp and circumstance
A Venetian Coronation, The Gabrieli Consort, St John’s Smith Square
The last weird decade
We have lost the oddness of the 1990s
Doing the Strand
The glorious heyday of Roxy Music, when just to be a fan of a band that sounded like no other was like being in an exclusive club
Musical scores
Great passages of play evoke great music
Before and after gould
Bach’s Goldberg Variations have a rich history that far transcend its modern association with Glenn Gould
Royals in an online age
Can the royal mystique survive the glare of modern media?
The contested legacy of “Rocky Horror”
How should we interpret a film that is much more than a light-hearted camp classic?
Schrödinger’s Culture War
Is it a myth or a tremendous success?
Bursting the myth of the “people’s war”
The Home Guard was not a nation-in-arms of the Jacobin kind
What we don’t talk about when we talk about mental illness
We talk about mental health differently – but is it an improvement?
Improvement and impoverishment
Urban life from the poorhouse to the public house
“Scottish visas” would double down on two failed ideas
The plan offers the worst of devolution and mass migration in one policy
Shattered illusions
The record of the authorities defies denials of two-tier policing
How to be anti-woke without being weird
There is a thin but vital line to tread
Good, mostly clean, fun
The Boys from Syracuse, Upstairs at the Gatehouse
Kemi Badenoch is a useful idiot
The former Secretary of State has a track record of advancing woke regulations
