Music
Vinyl solution
Vinyl’s comeback is down to a desire for a tangible point of contact with a performer
Beyond satire
Opera North and English Touring Opera have plied an honourable trade without trying to gain kudos
My perfect castaway
Robin Ashenden whiled away a forced sojourn in Georgia by feasting on the back catalogue of Desert Island Discs and compiling a list of his favourite guests
Outwards and inwards
Drawing the ear into every era of western music
The missing dimension
Warning: contains passages of symphonic transcendence
Midnight’s mass
Taylor Swift’s talent for ordinariness that makes her the most exceptional artist at work today
Not so easy listening
Janacek, Brahms, Bartok: Violin sonatas (Alpha-Classics/Outhere)
Top of the polls
Starmer’s cult of impersonality is frustrating Labour Leninists everywhere
New tunes from a hatful of old songs
We approach Dylan’s both peerless and wildly uneven catalogue only through the after-image of his dazzling prime
Inquest into the death of ENO
The cause of death, in this coroner’s verdict, is a prolonged failure to address reality
David Lammy’s Caucasus catastrophe
The Foreign Secretary’s blunder has exposed the hollowness of “progressive realism”
Alive and flicking
A game invented by a man named Adolph might have been a hard sell to the British public, but it was an instant hit
The first victim of empire
England is an ongoing casualty of the British imperial project
Getting the measure of the Russian bear
A defensive concern under the right conditions can morph into a warrant for brutal expansionism
The EU is leaving Britain behind on immigration
The continent is waking up to the need for solutions, and Britain must wake up as well
A full-blooded blow-out
Kurt Weill: Symphonies, Seven Deadly Sins (DG)
Let’s leave the Commonwealth
There is no point in being a member just to be browbeaten about our past
The curious incuriosity of multiculturalists
We cannot blind ourselves to differences between people
Out of Africa
You can say what you like about European empires, but they improved African cooking
The reality of assisted dying, an open letter
A plea to MPs to vote against this dangerous law
Shiva Naipaul
The younger brother of a controversial Nobel Prize winner who has been unjustly overlooked
