Music
Jenufa’s body
Zlatomir Fung: Fantasies (Signum)/Stephen Sondheim: Chamber music (Bridge)
On “Festen” and forgetting
The latest production of the Royal Opera was gripping but occasionally unconvincing
Royally good
The King’s Singers: Such stuff as dreams are made on (Signum)
Russian roulette
Musicians lived in constant terror of putting a foot, or a note, wrong
Sheer sensual pleasure
Fatma Said: Lieder (Warner Classics)
Bring back the Radio 4 UK Theme
A fractured nation needs its unifying sounds
Mahler done right
Gustav Mahler: 7th symphony (BR Klassik)
Don’t let it go
Communal singing is good for the soul
Spotify Wrapped is good for the soul
On the joys of exploring a year in music
A Soviet revelation
David Oistrakh: The Warner Remastered Edition (58CDs, 3DVDs)
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
Bonfire of the fallacies
Two opposing ideas about hard power and foreign policy — legalism and nihilism — are being exposed by the Trump
administration
Leaving the ECHR would not make Britain like Russia
The case for opposing withdrawal is currently intellectually fatuous
The misfits of Middagh Street
What a bunch: gifted and impossible to live with
The disunited kingdom
The establishment must confront the disturbing realities of sectarian politics in the UK
Just a Prime Minister
Keir Starmer only seems to have one answer to his critics
The masculinity crisis is a porn crisis
We have to do more to challenge the reshaping of culture by pornography
We must save the right to smoke
Liberals must not put down the sword against paternalism
A Laboured response
Keir Starmer and his advocates are all out of ideas
How to build a Europe of the peripheries
Resetting Britain’s relations with the EU should not mean being beholden to France and Germany
What’s so illiberal about “illiberal democracy”?
Viktor Orbán has been a political pioneer in Europe
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