Music
Barometer
Service record The government is to form a design panel to improve motorway services stations. These have not always charmed…
Blunt weapon
Only a fool would mess with James Blunt. As his Twitter followers know, he has a sharp wit, and, as…
Let posh people run the arts – if it means they stop running the country
What should we do with James Blunt? This is what I have been asking myself. And I am not looking…
No crib for a bed
I could never understand as a little girl why we sang: ‘Away in a manger, no crib for a bed.’…
A multi-talented musician
On 17 May 1969 Leonard Bernstein ended his 12-year run as musical director of the New York Philharmonic with a…
The driving force of an ageing rocker
Why do people talk about ‘experimenting’ with drugs when mostly they just mean that they’re doing them? Perhaps, as I…
Dear Mary
Q. My future son-in-law has been successfully house-trained in the use of upper-middle-class English over the years that he has…
Cultural revolution
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how…
Psycho thriller
I had a fair idea of what I was in for when I went to see The Fall at Brixton’s…
Independence will lead to artistic ‘desecration’
Daniel Jackson foresees an impoverished cultural landscape for an independentScotland, with artists forced to do Salmond’s bidding
A perfect stranger
If I had to be marooned on a desert island with a stranger, that stranger would be John Burnside. Not…
Irresistible zing and pizzazz
Philip Hensher on the tragically short life of the ebullient and multi-talented musician, Constant Lambert
Diary
Last October, in these very pages, I wrote with what is now annoying prescience, ‘Like almost everyone else in the…
The church of self-worship
Sunday morning among the atheists
Fast train to friendship
I had five decades of delight with the Everly Brothers – and it all began on the Flying Scotsman
The magnificent Seventh
The horrors of the Leningrad siege — the 900 Days of Harrison Salisbury’s classic — have been pretty well picked…
The food of love
The Albek Duo are two astonishingly beautiful and talented Venetian musicians, Fiona and Ambra, who are identical twins. Hearing the…
Spoilt for choice
Nigel Simeone’s title for his edition of Leonard Bernstein’s correspondence rings compellingly, novellistically, through the force of the definite article,…
‘I shall surely sing’
A few weeks ago, I was wandering with a friend around West London when our conversation turned to the reliable…
Diary
Hay-making was easy this year, and over in good time for a holiday. I am opposed to holidays, having worked…
