Salon Strauss
An opera without singers, a Strauss orchestra of just 16, and an early music ensemble playing Mahler: welcome to the…
Pregnant silence
Brian Sewell once wrote an article about abortion headlined: ‘Women, the killers in our midst.’ He got an awful lot…
Dangerous liaisons
Lothario, Don Juan, philanderer, ‘naughty’, ‘plays away’ — all terms for men who have an overwhelming drive to seduce scores…
One man rules
Optimists speculate that Xi Jinping’s power accumulation is the prelude to a burst of liberalising reform in his second five-year…
Lost in translation
If Michel Barnier and David Davis, in their regular dialogue of the deaf, seem to be inhabiting different mental universes,…
No deal is a good deal
So Theresa May and Jean-Claude Juncker enjoyed a ‘broad and constructive exchange’ during their working dinner in Brussels. Last time…
Cult classic
In Dan Brown’s new thriller, Origin, we are introduced to the Catholic church’s sinister far-right rival — a paranoid worldwide…
Mad Men – The Opera
Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti begins not with a prelude, but a jingle. In Matthew Eberhardt’s production a trio of…
Marriage guidance
In Competition No. 3020 you were invited to submit the formula for a successful marriage courtesy of a well-known husband…
2332: Glad all over
The unclued lights (one of two words and one hyphened) when preceded by a five–letter word are phrases listed in…
Dear Mary
Q. A newish friend who has very good manners lent me a DVD of his grandfather at the Olympics. I…
The young oppress their future selves
Matt Ridley’s fine recent Times column was hardly the first to raise the alarm about the pseudo-Soviet intolerance of the…
A choice of first novels
Black Rock White City (Melville House, £16.99) is ostensibly about a spate of sinister graffiti in a Melbourne hospital. ‘The…
Unearthly powers
This delightfully good-humoured novel is the sort of genre scramble that doesn’t often work: there’s a bit of 1990s family…
The pilgrims’ ways
Liza Picard, an chronicler of London society across the centuries, now weaves an infinity of small details into an arresting…
Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat
Lord Woolton put it best: ‘Few people have succeeded in obtaining such a public demand for their promotion as the…
Art and aspiration
When Adam Gopnik arrived in Manhattan in late 1980 he was an art history postgrad so poor that he and…
Three daemons in a boat
Philip Pullman’s new k, the prequel to his Northern Lights series — the one north Oxford academics very much prefer…
Lend me your ears
Complaints about the decline and fall of political oratory are nothing new. Back in 1865 a British reporter branded the…
Hunt the lady’s slipper
Who would want to read a whole book about a teenage boy’s gap year? When most 18-year-olds take time off…
Something scary in the attic
How do you like your ghosts? Supernatural fiction is arguably the hardest to get right. Ideally it should terrify, but…
Broken dreams
In the expensive realm of musical comedy, it’s impossible to predict what will take off and what will crash and…
High life
I may have spoken too soon last week when I defended my old friend Harvey Weinstein. It now looks very…
Free votes: a free reform
When the dispiriting kabuki theatre that is the same-sex marriage survey finally reaches its denouement next month, focus will again…
Chesterton’s prophesy
To step back and take a broad view of history is to see a constant and almost incessant Muslim onslaught…
