Opera Review
Not mad for it
I Puritani, Royal Opera, Covent Garden
Wilde times at the country house
Gerald Barry’s outrageous The Importance of Being Earnest manages to overmatch the virtuoso original
Tasty tunes
The Chocolate Soldier, Opera della Luna, Wilton’s Music Hall
Jolly boating weather
The Gondoliers, English Touring Opera, Hackney Empire
Mass hysteria
Sancta, Flanders Opera, Antwerp
Show me what love is
Don Giovanni, Flanders Opera, Antwerp
Relationship status: it’s complicated
Partenope, English National Opera, Coliseum
Case closed
The Makropulos Case, Royal Opera
The nun’s tale
Dead Man Walking, English National Opera, Coliseum
Ritual and redemption
Parsifal, Ghent Opera House
Most Read
A shameful Bill
Labour is spectacularly failing the British people on immigration
The hitch with the Hitch
How Christopher Hitchens brought me back to Christ
The ties that bind
A revived society tie has raised thousands for hedgehogs — and reminds us what Britain has lost with the decline of the club tie
Going Green
A day out with Zack Polanski and friends
Against Northernism
“Northernism” is a superficial form of cultural branding, not a serious political project
Decolonisation dissected
This toxic and destructive ideology must be rejected
We can restrict doctors’ strikes
Well-paid doctors should not be allowed to endanger patients uninhibited
Grooming gangs and the truth
We should not give ammunition to deniers of the grooming gangs scandal
Food pairing is folly
A warning against trying to match wine to dish
Good enough for politics
We should be more willing to declare some political problems solved
The great recoupling
Our politicians have a bizarre sense of costs and benefits when it comes to energy
Kemi at the crossroads
Kemi Badenoch cannot tell everybody what they want to hear
Why a wealth tax would fail
Wealth taxes have been tested in various countries and have been abandoned for very good reasons
A.E. Housman
The poet is less read than he once was but his deep love of England still resonates
All the single ladies
Instead of trying to persuade reluctant women into motherhood, policymakers should focus on helping enthusiastic parents have larger families
The false filibuster framing
There was nothing undemocratic about resistance to the Assisted Dying Bill