Deadlier than the male
Last week a 17-year-old girl forced the Edexcel exam board to change its A-level music syllabus to include the work…
Deadlier than the male
Last week a 17-year-old girl forced the Edexcel exam board to change its A-level music syllabus to include the work…
All roads lead to Callas
Bellini belongs to that category of not-quite-great operatic composers whose works are also very difficult to perform adequately, and don’t…
All roads lead to Callas
Bellini belongs to that category of not-quite-great operatic composers whose works are also very difficult to perform adequately, and don’t…
Double tragedy
To examine an ancient text requires an understanding of the ancient imagination. The Oresteia is set in a primitive world…
Double tragedy
To examine an ancient text requires an understanding of the ancient imagination. The Oresteia is set in a primitive world…
Eastern airs
On Private Passions this week the writer Amitav Ghosh gave us a refreshingly different version of what has become a…
Eastern airs
On Private Passions this week the writer Amitav Ghosh gave us a refreshingly different version of what has become a…
Remembering P.J. Kavanagh
‘Elms at the end of twilight are very interesting,’ wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in his journal: ‘Against the sky they…
Hoof-trimming
The below is an unpublished poem, written for Moortown, the verse-diary of Ted Hughes’s experiences of farming in Devon in…
On the way to Plumpton
We pull up at Wivelsfield, under a blue sky, and glance out at the one figure on the platform: a…
Review
(reading Daphne Rooke) Thank you for the book. It reminded me in the way she writes, dry as the Karoo,…
Bridge
The cheating scandal rages on. The latest to be accused is the world’s number one-ranked pair, Fulvio Fantoni and Claudio…
Coup de (dis)grâce
The knifing of Tony Abbott will go down as one of the most destructive and arrogant acts of political bastardry…
The Living Wage is nifty politics – but let’s see more help for small business too
What is George Osborne’s Living Wage? Is it a ploy to shift cost from the taxpayer to the employer by…
The problem with Corbyn’s hatred of the media
The new leader walks across a bridge, in the dark, while the journalist asks him questions. He’s not shouting, this…
Soon we will accept that useless lives should end
Listen http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeathoftheleft/media.mp3 Throughout the short life of the Assisted Dying Bill which failed last week in the Commons, the ‘faith…
Corbyn puts the EU referendum on a knife edge
Listen http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeathoftheleft/media.mp3 No one watching Jeremy Corbyn walk around the Palace of Westminster would imagine that he had just won…
The Spectator’s notes
When the Labour party began, its purpose was the representation of labour (i.e. workers) in the House of Commons. Indeed,…
Socialist Cluedo
What a load of manipulative, hysterical tosh is An Inspector Calls. It wasn’t a work with which I was familiar…
Why emote about migrants during a concert?
How should we deal with people who sneeze in public places? Stephen Jackson, aged 49, has found himself in court…
The fog of law
The Prime Minister should have kept things simple and avoided legalistic talk of imminent attacks
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, told Parliament that he had authorised the killing, on 21 August, by means of…
