Music
Irritatingly glib take on a golden year
Stanfield adds little to the history of rock that hasn’t been said better elsewhere
John Adams: Slonimsky’s Earbox (Alpha)
Among his best work
John Cage: Four Walls (Fuga Libera)
More than a little bit mad
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
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
Peston’s Inbox
Farage: I’m not worried
Why 1776 matters to modern Britain
The American founding is a case study in peaceful regime change
A below-par Riley is still better than most
The Palm House by
Gwendoline Riley; My Death by Lisa
Tuttle; Still Talking by Lore Segal
When imitation is more then just flattery
An informative and entertaining history of plagiarism in its many forms
Graphics, games and occult entities
A retrospective of Treister’s work reveals the frictions in the artist’s motivations
Woke politics was never trivial
Wokeness was a lot more, and a lot worse, than a passing online fad
Our oriental roots
Marian Boswall salutes the early plant
hunters who revolutionised gardening
Can liberalism recover?
A new book charts a different course for a dispositional liberalism
No bullshit government
Tom Jones grills the shadow minister for
policy renewal about the plans of a
future Tory administration
A profound Tory
Simon Heffer’s biography of Enoch Powell very much deserves revisiting
Tony Blair is an extremist
He should have left public life long ago