Music
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
The sound of love
Robert Schumann expresses the intense passion and despair of true love better than any other composer
A square prehistory of popular music
Rock versus pop, and orchestral numbers versus guitar solos
Sounds and sweet airs
Classical music is flourishing in Britain — though if you listened to our cultural elite you’d never know it
Bring on the big beasts
Music needs heavyweight champions to stand up for truth and excellence
Music’s moral conscience
The violinist Gidon Kremer stands brilliantly apart from the rest of the music world
Drum fast, die young?
Taylor Hawkins is not the only drummer to meet with an early grave
Smoke Signals
How a song can drift across a life
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
Final Analysis
The real measure of a degree
Fell for it again
Britain’s pro-development enthusiasts mistook fantasy politics for the real thing — and are now paying the price.
The masses against the classicists?
Reflections on the virtues and vices of academic gatekeeping
Calypso and carnage
A seismic Test series and a harbinger of a new force in Test cricket
Gender self-ID was never the law
Barrister Akua Reindorf KC speaks about the controversial trans guidance the government is so loath to implement
Pärtly good
Arvo Pärt: 4 symphonies (Chandos)
Scotland’s cold and durable fire
John Swinney is proving that in politics what matters most is simply showing up
After the flood
Net migration may be falling, but the long tail of Britain’s recent immigration regime ensures the debate is far from over
First-place Finnish
Shostakovich: Symphony 1; Moscow Cheryomushki (Philharmonia Records)
Where hatreds meet
Antisemitism and misogyny have a lot in common
Let’s pay MPs less
MPs are getting another inflation-busting pay rise — even as the country they govern grows poorer