Pop Music
Micro niche
The best piece of pop
Words and music
The bookish thrill of recognising the literary references of the pop artists you love
Top of the pops?
What makes great rock and roll
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
Most Read
Tame Impala fails to impress
unconquered by a
taste of Crusader food
Gary Stevenson is wrong about wealth taxes
The popular economist is irritating, but more importantly he is mistaken
Why they hated Ann Widdecombe
Fair-minded people could agree or disagree with her opinions. Left-wing bigots hated her for not abandoning them
What is wrong now was wrong before
Julia Gillard should not pretend that the “unintended consequences” of the gender debate were unknowable
Ethnic minorities are abandoning Labour
It is not just Muslim voters who have been abandoning the Labour Party
Why does Labour hate our pubs?
The government has to stop taxing the hearts of our communities out of business
First-place Finnish
Shostakovich: Symphony 1; Moscow Cheryomushki (Philharmonia Records)
Is football hooliganism fashionable?
As violence returns to Edgware Road, official insistence that two-tier policing is a myth looks increasingly difficult to sustain
QAnon for centrist dads
Peter Chappell’s What If Reform Wins is less a political forecast than a Westminster panic attack in novel form
Reclaiming Christian nationhood
Linking the Christian faith to our national identity is not radical (or American)
Gruesome twosomes
Considering culinary mismatches
Ice and fire
Ben Stokes has had a truly exceptional career
Zurbarán on Freud’s couch
An acclaimed new exhibition is full of overwrought symbolism and compositional failures
On travellers and trail hunting
Left-wingers have bizarrely irrational double standards when it comes to protecting culture
Britain needs the Med mindset
We have to adapt to the sweatier realities of a changing climate
Zelda Zingari
Arty types: the fashionable poet