Polish Culture
Anger and intuition
Mieczyslaw Weinberg: String quartets 6, 13, 15 (Chandos)
Polish strings
Grazyna Bacewicz: Symphonies 3 &4; Concerto for string orchestra (both on Chandos)
Francis Bacon’s visceral language
Pain and pleasure are never far away in these portraits
The grim quasi-religious doctrine of “unconscious bias training”
Baroness Royall’s commitment to the idea should concern Oxford students, academics and administrators
The public sector must reform or die
Too big to fail? It is too big to succeed
The blame, again, falls on Sinn Fein
The party responded appallingly to its press officer being accused of child sex offences
Reject the culture of death
Darkness lies beyond the euthanasia rubicon
What’s wrong with the Human Rights Act?
It makes judges the arbiter of moral and political as well as legal decisions
Brooding blokes
Russian writers loved a pouting, picturesquely pained protagonist
The professional classes don’t understand manual work
They cannot understand distinctions between different kinds of labour
What do Labour think a conversion therapy is?
There has to be a middle ground between complete denial and complete affirmation
When America ignored a slaughter
Whatever America’s flaws, its absence from the global stage leaves a space quickly filled by far more malevolent actors
The strange death of the Office for Place
The demise of the Office for Place is a missed opportunity for housing
