Bad policy, bad politics
Sanctions are morally dubious and a poor substitute for good foreign policy
Great Tenor, shame about the bric-a-brac
Lohengrin is early, just after Tannhäuser in the cavalcade of Wagner’s masterpieces, with a swan-drawn Arthurian hero in thrall to…
Aussie life
The education of the young is an essential component for the transmission of culture from one generation to the next.…
Language
We all know ‘adult’ the noun, and we know what an ‘adult’ is (‘because,’ as a friend said to me,…
Doors of perception
Describing the Venice Biennale, like pinning down the city itself, is a practical impossibility. There is just too much of…
Fresh knickers
Last April Fools’ Day, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo wound up their award-winning film review show on BBC Radio 5…
Oops! He did it again
Every so often, Jason Pierce drifts into focus. It happened at the end of the 1980s, when his then group…
It pierces the heart
Terence Davies’s Benediction is a biopic of the first world war poet Siegfried Sassoon told with great feeling and tenderness.…
How far will house prices fall? Frankly, don’t ask me
‘Forecasting is a mug’s game’ is a truism attributed to everyone from fantasy author Douglas Adams to former Bank of…
G-force
Imagine growing up with a whole orchestra as your plaything. Richard Strauss’s father was the principal horn of the Munich…
Quiet thunder
Hampstead’s latest play is a knotty rape drama by Naomi Wallace set in Kentucky. Four teenagers with weird names meet…
Letters
Don’t ban Russia’s culture Sir: It is uncouth, illiterate and actually beneficial to Putin when theatres, opera houses and other…
Portrait of the week
Home The annual rate of inflation, impelled by energy costs, rose to 9 per cent, its highest since 1982. Unemployment…
Rooney tunes
It’s official: television has a new genre. Its features include leisurely half-hour episodes, plenty of literary chat, several scenes set…
Bowls
Bowls has a reputation as a sedate pastime, but it can be as fiercely competitive as any other sport. It…
Bad songs for a good cause
Twice during the Eurovision Song Contest our television lost the signal and the set went blank – once, mercifully, during…
