Birmingham
Portrait of the week: US strikes Venezuela, China taxes contraceptives and happy anniversary to the Birmingham bin-strikers
Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said Britain was not involved ‘in any way’ in the US strikes on…
Imagine what Enoch Powell might have said
The great John O’Sullivan has a story about Enoch Powell which he keeps promising to put into print. Since he…
Robert Jenrick is right
I’ve just got back from doing a spot of shopping in my local town – and do you know what…
Portrait of the week: Rachel Reeves cries, Rishi Sunak joins Goldman Sachs and a six-month bin strike
Home Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had given a theme to the week by sitting weeping behind Sir…
Dramatic, urgent and intriguing: BBC1’s This Town reviewed
After conquering the world with Peaky Blinders (and before that by co-creating Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), Steven Knight…
Councils of despair
Last month India managed to land a spacecraft on the moon for a third of the price of refurbishing Hammersmith…
Letters
Why we allowed it Sir: In her article ‘Why didn’t more people resist lockdown?’ (3 September), Lionel Shriver partially answers…
Resculpting the past
Rather than tearing statues down, Hew Locke believes in reworking them to highlight their place in our imperial history. Stuart Jeffries speaks to him
Hot stuff
One legacy of lockdown in the classical music world has been the sheer length of the 21-22 season. In a…
In league with the devil
The most headline-grabbing of these three pop docs was Framing Britney Spears, part of the New York Times Presents documentary…
‘Where I grew up, classical music was diversity’
Richard Bratby talks to Birmingham Opera Company’s new music director Alpesh Chauhan about his Brummie roots, Bruckner and how his BAME heritage is a non-story
Straight to number one
Pop music has always been, to those who love it, to some degree tribal or factional; fans like to carve…
The financial logic behind HS2 is collapsing. It’s time to pull the plug
No one is in any doubt about the problem facing Britain’s railways. Over the past decade, rail fares have risen…
Goodbye to all that
Glimpsing the title of Lynsey Hanley’s absorbing new book as it fell out of the jiffy bag, I found myself…
An inconvenient truth
‘Our findings will shock many people,’ promised Trevor Phillips at the beginning of What British Muslims Really Think (Channel 4,…
The heavens are falling
The dystopian novel in which a Ballardian deluge or viral illness transforms planet Earth has become something of a sub-genre,…
All in the mind
You don’t expect to be brought close to tears by the Reith Lectures, which are after all at the most…
Why most four-year-olds deserve to be sectioned
The first episode of Let Us Entertain You (BBC2, Wednesday) definitely couldn’t be accused of lacking a central thesis. Presenter…
Quarter
‘No quarter given,’ yelled my husband as he stabbed at a cushion with his stick, spoiling the cavalier effect a…
Beauty and the bleak
The Ice Break is Michael Tippett’s fourth opera, first produced at Covent Garden in 1977 and rarely produced anywhere since,…
Still life
You might think it a fool’s errand to attempt programmes about art on the wireless. How can you talk about…
The sermon that taught me what’s happened to Birmingham
Birmingham has changed a bit since I grew up there in the 1970s. Back then, the stories of the hour…
Cameron must reunite the Tories or lose next year’s election
No one goes to Birmingham to revive a marriage. But that is what David Cameron and the Conservative party must…
Let’s face it – Ray Honeyford got it right on Islam and education
The Bradford head teacher was dismissed for emphasising nationality over religion. He should have been applauded
Portrait of the week
Home After an Ofsted inspection of 21 schools in Birmingham (none of them faith schools), against the background of allegations…
