On Opera
Gothic staging
The Turn of the Screw, Coliseum
Why can’t there be more vampires?
Bloodsucking, in various more or less metaphorical guises, is after all opera’s happiest place
Less than the sum of its parts
Eugene Onegin, Royal Opera
Borientalism
Madama Butterfly, Opera Ballet Flanders, Antwerp
Magic moments
A bomb dropped into the frightful world of mid-Victorian musical entertainment
A full Platée
A daring production of a daring work
Gelding: the pros
Bring back the castratos? Might as well
Revolution in the air
Andrea Chénier, Royal Opera House
Bedlam bingo
Sex, death, sado-masochism and blasphemy in a heady cocktail
Loony tunes
Opera begs leave to celebrate lunacy in a different way
Nothing to declare
Labour have done nothing wrong, but they’re going to stop it
You can’t legislate away hatred
Don’t just do something, stand there
Is Keir Starmer coming for Twitter?
A campaign group with close ties to Labour Party reportedly hopes to “kill Musk’s Twitter”
Lock her up
And, simultaneously, let him go
How the DVSA is driving young people mad
Driving tests should be much more accessible than they are
The predictability of subverting expectations
What to expect when you’re expecting your expectations to be subverted
Towards a shared Englishness
There is a third way between civic nationalism and ethno-nationalism
Don’t shoot the piano man
A silent film pianist was blacklisted from the BFI for supporting J.K. Rowling
The mean queens of the book world
A rare case of a “progressive” employee facing consequences will not change the publishing industry
Sorry, not sorry
Sincere apologies require a shared set of values
Labour’s economic policies are incoherent
Labour risks collapsing under the weight of its own inner economic contradictions
