Music
Gone West
What happened to Kanye?
No, THIS is hardcore: UK82 remembered 40 years on
What happened to the early eighties world of doc martins and Mohawks?
Playing with fire
Is writing a show about burns victims and the pioneering Guinea Pig Club really “appropriate”?
Devil’s music
“Satanic Panic” still haunts heavy metal
Nastasia Khrushcheva: Normal Music (Melodiya)
In troubled times for Russia, this album hints at the future of the country’s music
Unfinished? Don’t start!
A new project to restore Beethoven’s incomplete symphony borders on pathological necromancy
In my ears and in my eyes
The Lyrics: the autobiography Paul McCartney never wrote
Money doesn’t smell
What’s the point of refusing Sackler funds for concert halls?
Unexpected music and a crisis of theology
The Critic Narrated: Episode Six, with Sarah Ditum and David Scullion
The unusual, the unsigned, the uncategorisable
Hip-hop has its place, but not necessarily on an alternative daytime radio station
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
Zackonomics is incoherent and outdated
Zack Polanski is a great political entrepreneur but he is terrible at economics
Self’s the man
Will Self can be absurd and obnoxious — but also highly entertaining and insightful
There is nothing authentic about Andy Burnham
The blokeish Labour man is as slimy a politician as the rest of them
Left-wingers are wallowing in post-truth politics
Complaints about right-wing “fake news” have obscured the biggest misinformation problem
The radical feminism—Christianity pipeline
For radical feminists, clarity about the realities of sex often opens onto a search for moral order
English football is not boring
Greater competition is being confused with dullness
Canis lupus labor
Europe is a wolf coming up the path to devour the Labour Party
The mirage of majesty
Royal charm cannot disguise Britain’s shrinking power in a transactional world
Polish piano
Andre Tchaikowsky: Piano concertos (Ondine)
Free speech is about principle, not political convenience
One might disagree with pro-Palestine radicals but that does not mean that they should be censored
The emperor’s new AI
A satirical X account is doing what the media class has failed to do, and report on the great AI delusion