Music
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
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
World Budget Day
On World Book Day, Jeremy Hunt tried and failed to dress up as Nigel Lawson
The Conservative betrayal of selective schooling
Grammar schools are great — but there are not enough of them
The poverty of miners’ strike nostalgia
We should not romanticise a futile and sometimes thuggish struggle
Chinese whispers
Oliver Dowden’s tough talk on Chinese hacking is less than wholly convincing
A passage to Istria
Long nights and grey days turn our correspondent’s mind to the Croatian coast
You can’t judge a book by its cover
All novels should be like this: stripped of the necessary but boring connective tissue
Plain Janeites
For all their admirable dedication, keepers of the Austen flame cannot be so protective
The meaningless models of “public health”
Another brick in the “public health” fortress of unreality
Kilkenny’s golden age
A fascinating exploration of Irish history could have been better and more comprehensively illustrated
The art of Caspar David Friedrich
In our brave new world of modern art, there’s a growing appetite for celebrating the mystery of the natural world
History will judge us on gender
How can the modern world tolerate such absurdity?
