Music
Charlie Watts: an unlikely rock star
The drummer of the Rolling Stones — a man of rare class, wit and distinction — has died at the age of 80
Trapped in a gilded cage
Women’s rights are far more precarious than we have been led to believe
The G&S divide
A large proportion of the English drive themselves mad with a baroque cocktail of fury, snobbery and self-hatred over Gilbert and Sullivan
Shostakovich: Piano concertos 1&2; piano trio 2 (Linn)
This is a recording that encapsulates the other, older side of Europe
Sparks of Life
The end of the Sparks brothers’ career matches the intensity and originality of its beginning
Savour the silence
The first duty of a conductor is to imagine a world without noise
Raging irritants
Knowing Rage Against the Machine are political doesn’t overcome my determination to enjoy them anyway
Original sin
Robert Thicknesse on the woes of modern, British opera
The rare breed of the conservative rock star
It is a strange world we live in when a musician’s personal politics leads to as much uproar as Winston Marshall’s case has
Vienna’s hapless missing link
Zemlinsky’s music is arresting and his ideas fertile and diverse, but he often goes unnoticed
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
A mean mood in Makerfield
Reform have enthusiasm, but quiet Labour voters could still swing it for Burnham
A.E. Housman
The poet is less read than he once was but his deep love of England still resonates
Dismantle the infrastructure of censoriousness
Digital technology and private intelligence are bolstering cultural censoriousness in universities
Peston’s inbox
It’s all nonsense, and none of it happened, and I can’t remember it, and it’s not what it looks like
Eat less chicken
Industrial farming is bad for the environment but it is also cruel
The Muslim modernisers
Muslim reformers do not innovate; they renew by seeking to mend what is broken
Dumbed-down democracy
“Public opinion” is useless when the public is largely ignorant
A crippling consensus
Labour, the Greens and the Lib Dems are singing from the same destructive hymn sheet
A country at war with itself
Washington politics can
best be understood through the history
of bitter factional in-fi ghting within both
the Democratic and Republican parties
Polish piano
Andre Tchaikowsky: Piano concertos (Ondine)
Jolly boating weather
The Gondoliers, English Touring Opera, Hackney Empire