Opera Review
Tawdry tales
The Tales of Hoffmann, Royal Opera House
Good, mostly clean, fun
The Boys from Syracuse, Upstairs at the Gatehouse
A full Platée
A daring production of a daring work
Loony tunes
Opera begs leave to celebrate lunacy in a different way
Making art of the Holocaust
As dramatic opera, The Passenger inhabits a grey zone of guard–prisoner relations
Off with the fairies
Unsurprisingly, the most brilliant of all English music-theatre pieces are mostly overlooked
Operettas for the apocalypse
As we career merrily ever deeper into the end-times, what is the appropriate soundtrack for civilisational collapse?
Divine trickery
Jephtha, Royal Opera House
Passionate subjectivity
La traviata, ENO, Coliseum
High-octane despair
Das Rheingold, Royal Opera House
Power and authority
The development of British towns in the 17th and 18th centuries
The age of reason, sliced and diced
No historian wields Ockham’s razor more effectively than J.C.D. Clark
Bursary school
Refuse to play the poverty card
Into the setting sun…
Next summer, head west to Pembrokeshire
Labour’s insecurity counsel
A strategy of concession and apology will not build Britain’s soft power
The strange death of the Office for Place
The demise of the Office for Place is a missed opportunity for housing
The US city on the banks of the Thames
Critics don’t care for Canary Wharf, considering it a monument of 1980s corporatism
There’s no good way to equal pay
You can’t beat the laws of supply and demand
How H&W hit the iceberg
The opportunism and ineptitude that brought Belfast’s shipbuilding industry to its knees
From the monstrous to the grotesque
Hitler’s cult of charismatic leadership is indistinguishable from the ideology of National Socialism
Non-euclidean Toryism
The Conservative Party appears somewhat lost
