Pop Music
Bach in town
We need more classical music in public spaces
Lamar’s lament
Good art doesn’t have to be politically correct
Is classical colonial?
Naive proposals to “decolonise” Western classical music risk losing the richness of its history
Doing the Strand
The glorious heyday of Roxy Music, when just to be a fan of a band that sounded like no other was like being in an exclusive club
Smoke Signals
How a song can drift across a life
What happened to sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll?
Music today is anodyne compared to the heydays of Britpop and the sixties and seventies
Play it again, Sam
Nostalgia has long been the key to pop’s survival
Long players
As long as the fans are alive, it seems that a band can keep going
Gimme, gimme, gimme
It is time, once again, to take a chance on Abba
Sparks of Life
The end of the Sparks brothers’ career matches the intensity and originality of its beginning
A house divided
American partisan divisions are the result of social atomisation
An open letter on academic free speech
Calls for more intellectual openness are not a defence of Islamists and Holocaust deniers. A response to Mark Ferguson MP
Shiva Naipaul
The younger brother of a controversial Nobel Prize winner who has been unjustly overlooked
Don’t bite the hand that feeds the birds
The government’s flawed biodiversity analysis endangers successful state-funded schemes
The expensive problem with the minimum wage
Higher wages for some, perhaps, but joblessness for others
The fables of Davos Man
Yuval Noah Harari has written another long book with little wisdom
Inflation and inflated expectations
To understand inflation, we must understand different kinds of inflation
Let’s leave the Commonwealth
There is no point in being a member just to be browbeaten about our past
Kemi Badenoch has a problem with the truth
From wokeness, to housing, to immigration her words don’t match the facts
Britain should get serious about organised crime
We underestimate how much crime is the work of small, nasty groups of people
Is the culture war over?
Populist political victories do nothing to change the reality of progressive institutional dominance
