The Victorians
Pollyannaish study is a missed opportunity
Being Victorian: How it Felt Then, Why it Matters Now by Jamie Camplin
Writing lives
The life story of the biography, from Victorian glorification to Bloomsbury boldness to contemporary obliquity
A statement flower
The most fanatical have spent fortunes to find the rarest and finest of these blooms
Here be flagons
The temperance campaigners realised that a picture can achieve more than a thousand words of argument
Big beasts versus the Bible
Darwin sidelined the Creator by documenting the slow mechanisms of evolution
In praise of people’s parks
A civilising tradition has been sadly neglected
Rickards remembered
A fine tribute to an industrious architectural eccentric
Passionate subjectivity
La traviata, ENO, Coliseum
Why public health has become a dirty word
The field has been hijacked by a politicised and self-serving class of experts
Pains of Victorian labour
The experience of pregnancy and childbirth in 19th century Britain was no picnic
Most Read
The martyrdom of Young Bob
On ebbing power of the political influencer
Grooming gangs and the truth
We should not give ammunition to deniers of the grooming gangs scandal
Why has Keir Starmer been so unpopular?
He was the perfect embodiment of a failing system
Babies need women
Leaving children with only men who are not their parents is foolish and dangerous
Stop ignoring the Islamisation of our democracy
The British state is bending to Islamism, not attempting to defeat it
Critical briefing: energy price shocks
The shocks from the Iran War are yet to be felt, but are sure to be powerful
Can we get removals right?
Deporting illegal migrants is a lot more difficult than promising to deport them
It’s what you Makerfield of it
Andy Burnham may yet stop Reform, but victory would raise almost as many questions for Labour as defeat.
Questions for the Munich hawks
It is wrong to use Neville Chamberlain as a byword for cowardice and fecklessness
Who will pound longest?
America has military might — but does it have the appetite for war?
Leading us a not- so-merry dance
Virtually every moment of physical theatre has to include some sort of balletic lunge
QAnon for centrist dads
Peter Chappell’s What If Reform Wins is less a political forecast than a Westminster panic attack in novel form
The Hollywood starlet and the immigration albatross
Free marketeers were too content to ignore the negative externalities of immigration
No, the King has not converted
A bizarre conspiracy theory
that Charles III is a Muslim is
easily shown to be false
Pärtly good
Arvo Pärt: 4 symphonies (Chandos)
The enduring fascination of Richard Nixon
Why America’s most contradictory president still exerts a strange grip on the political imagination.