Music
Snaps, crackles and Pop Art
Things you didn’t know you were interested in — until someone wrote a good book about them
We can’t Retvrn to tradition
Sorry, trads and tradwives, modvrnity is here to stay
Once more with Gustavo
“Orchestra makes right call” shock!
Betjeman the beat poet
Recalling a thrilling collaboration between the poet and a group of oddball musicians
Honky-tonking around
Yuja Wang: The American Album (DG)
Excellence for everyone
What does the BBC have against classical music?
A welter of emotions
Rachmaninov: 2nd symphony (Chandos/Vox)
Vinyl solution
Vinyl’s comeback is down to a desire for a tangible point of contact with a performer
Beyond satire
Opera North and English Touring Opera have plied an honourable trade without trying to gain kudos
My perfect castaway
Robin Ashenden whiled away a forced sojourn in Georgia by feasting on the back catalogue of Desert Island Discs and compiling a list of his favourite guests
Most Read
The establishment is still living in an immigration fantasy land
It is influential left-wingers, not the broader public, who have deluded themselves on mass migration
American strategy in Iran is wiser than it seems
President Trump’s intervention will leave the world safer than it was
Saint Nicola
Nicola Sturgeon wants sympathy for her husband’s crimes—but after years spent avoiding awkward questions, her latest reinvention may be the hardest sell yet.
On Britain as a capitalist command economy
It is neither neoliberal nor socialist but a secret third thing
Rewatching the English
English identity has become too surreal and discomfiting to define
Zelda Zingari
Arty types: the fashionable poet
Britain will be worse without hereditary peers
The expulsion of the hereditaries is neither fair nor pragmatic
The Boston barbarians
The Boston Symphony acted like a New Orleans nightclub owner with a recalcitrant pole-dancer
Drill, baby, drill
We need Cornish lithium and tin just as much as North Sea oil — whatever the nimbys say
Stop saying sectarianism
Britain’s emerging politics are not really sectarian at all, but the result of neo-communal fragmentation
The malignant mediocrity of managerialism
A country ruled by lawyers and HR managers will be culturally desiccated and politically sclerotic
Westminster is not Manchester
Andy Burnham would find being the PM a lot more difficult than being a mayor
Trump: the imprudent king
The President has so far achieved the opposite of what he promised
Frivolous and doomed
Classicism still has its place at the National Theatre
The gateway myth
Does one risky lifestyle choice lead to another or are some people just different?
Institutional feminism against women
The likes of Julia Gillard and Jess Phillips have enabled misogyny