Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2025 i The Critic

WE ARE A PRINT MAGAZINE FOUNDED late in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. So, when it comes to discussing the state of the press we need to show some self-awareness. But whatever our own notions of self-worth, what does the fourth estate do for wider society? Is the media a voice? If so, for whom? Its proprietors? Its journalists? Could it be claimed that the media is a voice for its consumers? For a long time, the press told itself that journalism had a representative function and that by the act of consuming it, readers, listeners and viewers were mysteriously represented by their champions, the journalists. It is not difficult to spot the self-serving cant in this pretence. The press, in its long since passed pomp, was bullying,…

IS IT LEGITIMATE TO JUDGE lawyers-turned-politicians by their legal work? This question has rarely seemed more important, as Lord Hermer, the attorney-general, has come under fire about his time at the English bar, especially when as a law officer he has had to advise on issues affecting his former clients such as Gerry Adams. Almost by definition, every attorney-general will have had a variety of clients at the bar; but Lord Hermer is the first one to have specialised in suing the British government, thus making him far more vulnerable to political attacks. His response has been to admit, under great political pressure, that he has recused himself from advising on certain subjects as attorney, while refusing to tell anyone which files he has recused himself from. A fundamental part…

IN A WORLD WHERE NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION IS possible, how much should we fear the danger of war escalating? The question has resurfaced with the conflict in Ukraine. It last seriously arose for the West during the Korean War of 1950-53 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. In Korea, Cuba and now Ukraine, a breed of “maximalist” war hawks offer the same answer: “not much”. Indeed, they argue our anxiety is the problem. They lambast the policy of blunting Russian aggression while taking steps to avoid going to the brink. They accuse doubters of being feckless appeasers, branding policies short of maximalism as cowardly, irrational surrender to Russian coercion. It is folly, they say, to moderate Western efforts against Moscow, since we are already “at war” with Russia. To take Vladimir…

THE FIRST RECORDED USE of the acronym OMG is not by a teenage girl in the 2000s, it was by Admiral the Lord Fisher in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1917, expressing outrage at the failures of the Admiralty in the First World War. “Are we really incapable of a big Enterprise?” He asks at the end of his letter. “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis — O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) — Shower it on the Admiralty!” Purists will say this is blasphemy. “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” is the third commandment; and until very recently it was seen as socially unacceptable to blaspheme casually in polite society. (Naval officers have always had an exemption…

THAT THE BRITISH HAVE BECOME A NATION OF MENTAL SERFS —I speak grosso modo, of course — is suggested by the headlines starting with the locution “It’s official …” commonly to be found in journals of various tendencies. I took cognisance of this recently when I noticed three headlines in the supposedly hip magazine, Time Out. “It’s official: this is the best thing to do in 2025”; “It’s official: Leyton is one of the coolest places on the planet”; “It’s official: the USA is the third best country in the world”. In The Times I found “It’s official — 32 per cent of women are sad”. And in the Guardian I found “Now it’s official: Brexit will damage the economy long into the future”; “It’s official: muddy kids learn best”; “It’s…

GOOD OPENING SENTENCES can disarm readers. Jon Moynihan starts his two-volume blockbuster, on Return to Growth: How to Fix the Economy, with a caveat. He tells us, “I am not an economist”, elaborating a little later in these terms, “On occasion, in both books, I slip into economists’ language, talking as though I am an economist. I am not.” Whether, on balance, his volumes deserve the Nobel Prize for economics is moot. But Lord Moynihan certainly deserves a prize for something. For much of the twenty-first century the public debate on economic policy has sidelined growth at the expense of two sets of initials, DEI and ESG, and their associated agendas of wokery and greenery. Moynihan has the chutzpah to remind his readers that “more stuff” (to use one of…

Jaspreet Singh Boparai writes occasionally on art history, Latin culture and Punjabi culture FRA’ ANGELICO (1395–1455) PAINTEDthe Annunciation more than once. When we imagine the archangel Gabriel, and his announcement to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive and bear a son, our idea of how that scene should look has a lot to do with Fra’ Angelico’s powerfully lucid compositions. Yet the most supreme painter of angels is surely Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510). The ones he shows us in his Madonna of the Magnificat (1481) and Madonna of the Pomegranate (1487) in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence seem too beautiful to be human. St Thomas Aquinas once said that angels need bodies not for their own sake, but for ours. After all, they are “above” matter, and free from any…

EVERY JANUARY, IN A TOWN CLOSE TO where I live, an obliging member of the community climbs into a specially constructed frame covered in straw. This is closed over the volunteer’s head while their arms and legs protrude, allowing them to parade through the town as a “Straw Bear”. Evoking the travelling bear-baiters of times past, another performer leads the dancing “bear” on a string through the streets while soliciting donations of money and, in the pubs, beer. The whole proceeding ends, Wicker Man-style, with the ritual burning of the Straw Bear (volunteer safely removed), until it is resurrected the following year. The Whittlesey Straw Bear is just one example of the many peculiar “calendar customs” that fill Britain’s traditional year, and which are the subject of Liz Williams’s new book…

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE HAS VOTED The Third Man (1949) the greatest British film ever. John Walsh’s new book surveys the setting (Vienna), the director (Carol Reed), the actors Joseph Cotton (Holly Martins), Orson Welles (Harry Lime), Alida Valli (Anna Schmidt) and Trevor Howard (Major Calloway), the screenwriter Graham Greene and the zither player Anton Karas, as well as the film locations in Vienna and near London, and Reed’s influence on other directors. The Third Man has the same setting as Christopher Isherwood’s fictional description of Viennese politics and filmmaking in Prater Violet (1945). Three years later, during the Cold War, the city was divided into four sec British, Americans, French and the Russians, who were hostile to the Allies. The innovative camera angles, like the tilted floor and billiard table…

Sarah Moorhouse is a critic and freelance journalist KINDLES, SOARING COSTS, A GENERAL crisis about readers and their waning attention spans. The last couple of decades haven’t exactly been plain sailing for those in the book business. It’s not surprising, then, that stories of a supposed golden age of publishing have begun to crop up. Last year gave us Thomas Harding’s The Maverick, a biography of the publishing giant George Weidenfeld told through the 20 books that defined his career. Now Anthony Cheetham, the legendary editor who founded Orion, Century and Head of Zeus, has decided to take a turn at the microphone. His resulting memoir, A Life in Fifty Books, makes Harding’s 20 seem modest. It is a lavishly illustrated survey of a career that enabled its subject “to roam…

FATHER JOHN MISTY IS — IN THE best possible way — kind of a throwback. For one thing, there’s the stage name, which could have belonged to a gospel hollerer or a folk troubadour from any time in the mid-1900s. Then there’s the beard, which is full and luxuriant and ever so seventies. And the attitude: laconic, barbed, not quite kind. Also, obviously, the music. FJM (it feels weird to call him “Misty”; his real name is Josh Tillman) makes records that have an acoustic warmth you might hear on a decades-old 12-inch discovered in a charity shop, bought on the strength of its battered sleeve and fallen in love with on first listen. Only occasional electronica flourishes and a few of his lyrical pre-occupations give his true era away.…

“THIS PLACE IS AN INSTITUTION!” In a basement cinema, on a Thursday evening in central London, a largely female audience of 300 fans of 1980s murder mystery television was being addressed by a middle-aged Australian man in a tracksuit and a wig. For the previous two hours, we had been laughing our way through a single episode of Murder She Wrote, as our host Tim Benzie discussed the joys and clichés of the long-running show and invited us to work out which of the guest stars would turn out to be the murderer. But now, for a moment, Benzie was serious. “You might have seen in the news that the Prince Charles cinema” — where we’re sitting — “is under threat,” he said. That week, the Prince Charles had announced…

WERE PRESIDENT TRUMP THAT WAY inclined, he might usefully ginger up his speeches with references to The Columbiad, a grandiloquent poem of 8,350 lines in nine volumes written by Joel Barlow and published in 1807. It is an American Aeneid, a national epic that takes in the young country’s past, its struggle against British sovereignty, and envisages its shimmering future. Here is the story of making America great first time round. Barlow was an ardent republican who fought in the War of Independence and believed that “American civilisation was world civilisation”. Nevertheless, in 1792 he became a French citizen and was elected to the National Assembly. It was in Paris that he met another American republican, the painter John Vanderlyn. Vanderlyn (1775-1852) had been born at Kingston on the Hudson…

“BUT YOU MUST! THEY’RE revolting!” My wife wants me to see American women hawking recipes on Instagram. The source of her fascination is horror. The performances — grinning frighteningly in kitchens as sinister or rickety as Frankenstein’s lab — resemble auditions for extras in a Hammer movie. The dishes look like the black lagoon the green creature came from. Social media are among the many modern enthusiasms I cannot under stand. I am too snobbish or insufficiently leisured to bother with them. My excursion into Instagram cuisine only deepens my bafflement. “How many people watch this stuff?” I ask. The followers number between 200,000 and three million. I hope they watch ironically. There are some accounts of genuinely gastronomic interest, in which slick professionals peddle complicated recipes. Amateurs, however, offer…

DESPITE THE DRAB DRESS OF OUR DEMOTIC AGE, in which even Members of Parliament believe that bin liners and bean bags are best to drape across those green benches, the elegant hand of that old Regency rip, Beau Brummell, still reaches down to us across centuries, reminding us that while some clothes cost money, effort is free. Brummell’s own efforts are the stuff of legend. One morning a friend called at his house in Chesterfield Street. The visitor was ushered inside but asked to wait for the master was unready to receive visitors. So he waited … and waited. After a time and being tired of waiting, he made his own way up to Brummell’s room. There he found the great man coated and pantalooned but not quite girded to…

MARCH — AND I’VE GOT me an acute case of colour hunger — specifically for chilli. It started with Chinese New Year, a celebration at which I went hard, opportunities for festivity being thin on the ground. Presented with a dress code, as ever, I balked. “Ugh, not red,” I grouched. “Tad crashing, tad obv.” Immediately I was clothed, this was superceded by: “Red is life! Red is fire! Feel me burn! I am flesh! I am power! I am war!” plus other girlish fancies. Valentine’s Day is something I eschew as an occasion for amateurs, being someone who endeavours to have both a sex life and a life full stop. However, it does provide an opportunity for a spot of rosy drag. And, now, as Mars’s month beckons, I’m…

If others are winning by spewing brazen nonsense, why be a loser and restrict your utterances to what you sincerely believe to be true? IT’S NOT OFTEN YOU’RE PRESENT AT THE birth of a meme. But on 20 January, when the new Trump administration published its executive order on “defending women from gender ideology”, anyone paying attention could watch as the latest transactivist talking point emerged, blinking and squalling, to flummox the world. By defining “male” and “female” as “belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces” the small and large reproductive cell, respectively, the order aimed to halt the stealth redefinition of those words as identities, not biology. Cue an army of libfems, wokebros and blue-haired TikTokers claiming Trump had accidentally abolished the male sex since — apparently — all…

Stamping me out I HAVE A FUN LITTLE FILE STORED ON MY PHONE, titled “Fucker Stamped My Passport”. Brexit may have provided no discernible benefits for anyone but a handful of hedgies, but it has added an exciting element of risk to passing through immigration at Marco Polo airport. I have been resident in Italy since 2018, and have the biometric ID card to prove it, but I’m also obliged to carry an embossed certificate proving the date of my application and another card with my fiscal code. Nonetheless, half the time the passport bloke (it’s always a man), refuses to accept the evidence and stamps the document, meaning in principle that I have no right to return home for a few months. So then we have the row, where I…

WHEN A FRESH-FACED ED MILIBAND became energy secretary for the first time nearly two decades ago, his opening act was to strike a red pen through the key climate target he’d inherited — and massively increase it. In place of a promise to cut carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050, already seen as a stretch, he upped it to 80 per cent. It was late 2008, and crashing financial markets had just set Britain on course for recession and soaring unemployment; hardly the time for costly new commitments. But none of that stopped the neophyte minister. Economic difficulties were no excuse to “row back” on the commitment to tackle global warming, he said. It was what Sir Humphrey might have called a “brave decision”, and one that embroiled…

ON16 DECEMBER, 1947, KNUT HAMSUN, Norway’s most famous living novelist, stood in court to answer charges of treason. Once revered but now reviled, for years Hamsun had been an ardent proselytiser for Adolf Hitler. He supported the Nazi-backed government of Vidkun Quisling throughout the war following Germany’s conquest of Norway in 1940 and earned the opprobrium of the country when he wrote an obituary following Hitler’s suicide praising him as a “warrior for humankind and a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations … We, his closest followers, all bow our heads at his death.” Condemnation was instant and vociferous. His novels, which had earned him the admiration of his country such as Hunger and Pan and the universally well-regarded The Growth of the Soil, which won him…

AT CHRISTMAS, CHARLES DICKENSliked to perform a trick called The Pudding Wonder. As friends and family gathered around the table, he picked up a top hat, in which he pledged to bake a plum pudding before their very eyes. He would first secretly sweep into the hat an already cooked pudding in a topless tin. As his guests looked on, he took a larger tin, mixed the ingredients in it, and tipped it into the hat. As he did so, he swiftly lowered the tin into the hat so that the smaller tin was lifted out, stuck to the batter of the larger. The baked pudding would be left inside the hat. Warming the object over a candle flame helped the pudding to plop out, to everyone’s astonishment. One senses…

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT PUBS, BY A CAM-bridge professor. Very naturally, it draws on Cambridge for many of its illustrations. Cambridge is a city that has no shortage of historic pubs. The Eagle has its RAF bar, and its connection to Crick and Watson; The Pickerel has (probably) the greatest antiquity; The Champion of the Thames is a true time capsule. Any number of pubs have a Grade II listing. The first Cambridge venue to merit a photograph in Philip Howell’s delightfully eclectic little book is The Golden Hind. Surprising. Though well off the hardbeaten city-centre track, “The Hind” is inarguably interesting for its baroque mock-Tudor architecture, and extravagant interior decoration. Fine. But the next pub pictured does not meet anyone’s notability criteria. The picture has compositional oddities: it…

John Ritzema is a theologian with an interest the relationship between theology and constitutional law THIS VOLUME OF ESSAYS UNDER THEbroad and timely rubric of The Challenges of Democracy neatly complements Jonathan Sumption’s earlier collections Trials of the State (2019) and Law in a Time of Crisis (2021). Once again, Lord Sumption brings legal expertise, a concern for the careful exercise of power, and a weather eye for political, social and cultural faultlines to bear upon modern Britain. Readers will know that he does so from an uncommon combination of intellectual vantage points: a long legal career crowned with membership of the UK Supreme Court, alongside sustained (and prodigious) academic expeditionary warfare, in which Lord Sumption, operating from the Bar and Bench, launched repeated forays into the world of fourteenth-and…

John Self is The Critic’s lead fiction critic. He lives in Belfast A WEEK IS A LONG TIME IN POLITICS, but a decade is a blink of the eye in literature. In 2016, the British novelist David Szalay (pronounced Zoll-OY, more or less) had a breakthrough hit with his Booker-shortlisted novel All That Man Is. Szalay had always been a protean writer — his previous books were a satire, a romance and a thriller — but All That Man Is showed new range with its thematically linked scenes of masculinity at different ages, via different characters. So it’s a surprise that his first novel in nine years is, in one sense, more of the same: masculinity at different ages, but this time using the same character throughout. Flesh, as the title suggests,…

Norman Lebrecht on Music This earthy opera is a real sob story ONE OPERA ALWAYS MAKES ME CRY. Knowing what is to come, I have a handkerchief in hand and manage to keep it dry until the interval. But when the curtain rises on the second act of Jenůfa, as the foster mother decides to kill her daughter’s hidden baby, I am undone. Nothing in opera surpasses that single scenic blow to the seat of emotions. The effect is so visceral that I have seen cellists in the orchestra weep as they play and stagehands wipe their eyes on a sleeve. Not even the most perverse stage director (we’ll come to them) can disrupt the power of this opera, drawn from the darkest reaches of the soul. Years ago, tramping…

WHAT MADE SHOCK JOCKS SUCH AS Howard Stern and Opie and Anthony such cultural behemoths in the nineties and noughties was not just their strong language and outrageous stunts but their supposed authenticity. Other broadcasters were full of feigned enthusiasm and twee talking points. The likes of Stern were angry, lecherous and bitter. They talked about sexual, professional and interpersonal problems. They seemed real. They seemed like people the audience could relate to. With the rise of podcasting, it became possible not just to listen to a show and feel like you were hanging out with friends but to hang out with friends and make a show. Ironically, Stern, who must have inspired hundreds of podcasts, hates podcasters. He thinks the barrier to entry is too low. “It’s a lot…

IT’S ALWAYS A PLEASURE TO SEE A promising series mature on its second or third outing. I enjoyed the first season of The Night Agent when it came out in spring 2023. Based on a thriller by Matthew Quirk, a former reporter at the Atlantic magazine, it neatly showcased his insider knowledge of Washington DC’s murky corridors of power. The Night Agents work for Night Action, a super-secret branch of the US intelligence machine, so secret that it does not even officially exist. Gabriel Basso played Peter Sutherland, whose dull job was to answer the telephone if an emergency call came through on the Night Action hotline. By the end of the season he had metamorphosed into an all-American action hero. It was a winning formula of conspiracies, shoot-outs and…

ON A RECENT VISIT TO CORK, I TOOK the opportunity of going out into its western suburbs, to Bishopstown on the edge of open countryside to visit the Cork campus of Munster Technological University, a recently established university born out of the Cork Institute of Technology which itself had grown out of an amalgamation of various historic institutions, including the Royal Cork Institution. I had seen images of its campus buildings in a lecture given by its architect, Shane de Blacam. It looked strangely and unexpectedly neoclassical, with an architectural austerity and authority unusual in recent decades. Its semi-circular brick colonnade might have been influenced by the utopian imagination of the French neoclassical architects, Claude Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée, a remarkably impressive if faintly surreal experience. SHANE DE BLACAM…

COCKNEY RHYMING SLANG can cause problems for Americans looking to launch products in Britain, as Martin Amis noted in an article in the London Review of Books. He was reviewing Iron John, Robert Bly’s 1990 book about masculinity whose title will have East-Enders sniggering into their jellied eels. Amis writes: “I’m afraid, iron (iron hoof) means ‘poof’.” I didn’t know this, but I was born in Northwick Park. I did however raise a smile when Jon Bon Jovi released a French rosé called Hampton Water. “Hampton Wick” being rhyming slang for “prick”. You will of course remember the immortal lines from Carry on Henry: “Hampton Court?” “No, I always walk this way.” So to those born within the sound of the Bow Bells, the former poodle-haired rocker’s wine means something…

I WAS QUITE SURE I WAS GOING TO die out there. We had set off in the smaller of my pal’s two boats and as we left the harbour at Morston, on the North Norfolk coast, heading towards Blakeney Point, we’d run aground. Quite what we’d hit wasn’t clear, but the motor had cut out, the boat had spun round, and we were rolling on the swell. My thigh waders had seen better days and as the water lapped at the hull I realised that if we did end up going over, there was almost no way I would be able to untie the baler twine that was holding them up. Seals swam around us in the blackness and Willie, who’d been promising to take me out fowling for some time,…

MIRACLES OF MIRACLES, Hector has been offered an unconditional offer to, let’s just say, a “decent” school. Not Eton, obviously. Or indeed Harrow, or Westminster. Or Dulwich. Or City. Or King’s Wimbledon (a mad pipe dream I entertained, once in 2021, after drinking too many CBD-infused 0% Negronis). But, “acceptable”. For a moment, I seriously thought we were heading for some kind of forest-school-adjacent situation, where the only mandatory kit would have been waterproof trousers. And beards and limited-edition fashion Crocs for the parents. Truly! I went round one of these places. It was, as you’d imagine, basically a cult. They had teenagers doing eurythmics, and greeting each other in the corridors. ANYWAY. I’LL BE ABLE TO MENTION our “decent” school in Wholefoods, in the inevitable encounters with fellow mothers…

“DOES BREXIT MEAN NOTHING TO YOU? DID SHE DIE in vain?” Well, did she? Recent events have made the question moot. By casting off the shackles of European law and the European Court of Justice, Brexit was supposed to restore our independence as a nation and the sovereignty of our ancient Parliament. Within the last few weeks, however, profound doubt has been cast on the reality of both. An advisory opinion of one alien court, the International Court of Justice, apparently requires us not only to surrender the strategically vital Chagos Islands and their American-run base but also to bribe Mauritius with billions of pounds to accept them. While a ruling by another, the International Criminal Court, means that we have meekly agreed to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of a…

WHEN IT COMES TO Kemi Badenoch’s leadership, the case for the defence remains a simple one: that it is simply too early to judge her. Rebuilding from a defeat as shattering as last summer’s takes time — and time, in this telling, is the one resource the Conservative Party has in abundance. Besides which, surely the public has had enough of the party’s increasingly trigger-happy approach to its leaders? Simple, however, is not the same as persuasive. There is some merit to the above case, but even in the best of possible worlds there is always a clock ticking and Badenoch’s conduct so far has shortened that period of forbearance considerably. There are a couple of reasons for this. First is that appeals for patience work best when accompanied by…

GREEK FLAGS FLUTTER FROM APARTment blocks, Orthodox monks amble past statues of statesmen and freedom fighters along boulevards named after Byzantine emperors and saints. It is a normal weekday in modern Greece’s second-largest city. Fighter jets have been terrifying domestic animals and setting off car alarms with their high-speed passes during an airshow marking a national holiday, eliciting pride from most residents. So far, so national. In the amphitheatrical city’s upper neighbourhoods, a strange octagonal dome rises out of neglected Terpsitheas (“pleasantview”) square. A woman in her forties sits on a bench, fixing the shrine with her gaze. Just behind it, a man in his seventies sits on the elegantly-sculpted balcony of a villa. In a city once bustling with minarets and synagogues but now afflicted with amnesia over…

WHAT DO AN IRISH MONSIGNOR, the British ambassador’s valet, an eccentrically named Swiss count, a homosexual SS officer, Mussolini’s mistress, an extensive trove of sadomasochistic literature and the CIA’s James Jesus Angleton all have to do with each other? Espionage: Vatican style, apparently. Yvonnick Denoël’s book, originally published in French in 2021, claims to lift the lid on the Pope’s intelligence services — despite his admission that they don’t really exist. Even so, tales of spying and intrigue orbiting the Holy See are so numerous that an in-depth overview is past due. Vatican Spies is, alas, as flawed as it is absorbing. Sometimes, Denoël simply gets his facts wrong, as when he asserts that the Order of St Sylvester is the oldest and most prestigious of the Vatican’s honours system. (In…

IN AD 242, A ROMAN ARMY MARCHED EAST-wards, led by Emperor Gordian III, determined to defeat Rome’s nemesis, the Sassanid Empire. Gordian dreamed of replicating the achievements of Alexander the Great, his eyes set on Persia and distant India. He was not alone. Gordian III has been largely forgotten by history, his campaign ending in bloody failure, but marching behind his legions came a name that has shaped world history forever: the philosopher Plotinus. Today, Plotinus is famous as the father of Neoplatonism, a philosophical tradition derived from the inheritance of Platonic and Aristotelian thought that has gone on to shape not just academic philosophy but also the great monotheistic religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. He learnt philosophy in Alexandria, Egypt’s great cultural crossroads and one of the intellectual…

IN OUR TIME, THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC HAS become a favourite metaphor for cultural decadence and political catastrophe. Robert Kaplan, for example, conjures the notion of a “Global Weimar” in his apocalyptic new polemic Waste Land. In fact, Weimar does not entirely deserve its bad press: despite its obvious flaws, it abolished many of the defects of the preceding monarchy. The first German republic perished mainly for lack of republicans. Officially, however, the republic preserved the title that Bismarck had given his unified state in 1871: das Deutsche Reich (the German Empire). Weimarer Republik was originally a derogatory term invented by Hitler to delegitimise the first fully democratic state on German soil. Using Moeller van den Bruck’s confected mythology to describe their millennial project as das Dritte Reich (“the Third Reich”), the…

AS WITH SO MANY OF THE MORE entertaining crimes against humanity, it was opera that first honed the practice of gaslighting. What else to call the frat-boy hazing that poor wee Lammermuir Lucy suffers, with everloving brother Henry editing the letters he’s intercepted from her banned boyf Edgar, and cooking up other evidence of all the boompsadaisy the skunk is up to over in France? Interestingly, in Walter Scott’s original, it was Lucy’s mum doing the dirty work, but another of opera’s inspirations was to pioneer the idea that women are essentially incapable of doing bad things — a clever move given the audience profile, and something they really ought to be making more of now that the entire sex has officially attained to sainthood. Another pleasant side-effect of gaslight…

IT’S A RARE THEATREGOER WHO thinks, “I'm in the mood for a two and a half hour play about a 1997 climate change summit”. Much of the drama produced during the Greta Thunberg era has appealed largely to the already convinced who want to see their own anxieties and sense of urgency reflected on stage. But flops such as the National Theatre’s Greenland in 2011 dissuaded commercially-aware theatre companies from mounting ambitious productions on the topic. That means the international attempts to tackle global warming have gone largely unexamined by playwrights. Since the first meeting of the UN World Climate Conference in Geneva in 1995, there has been a running diplomatic circuit: latterly the bizarre COP summit in Baku, where I listened to the host’s welcome speech in praise of…

“DAMN BRACES,” WROTE WILLIAM Blake, “Bless relaxes.” Philip Larkin ordered it differently: “We should be kind while there is still time.” Though kindness should never mean indulgence. Larkin, wearing his jazz critic’s hat, was not always kind to John Coltrane, which doesn’t mean he was wrong. Is politeness, or civility, desirable? Some years ago, at a literary festival, a testy political commentator was asked that by the kind of lady (pleasant, well-spoken, engaged) who attends such shindigs. Ian Dunt replied: “I have always thought politeness is a bourgeois construct." It sounded like an emphatic “no”. Lefties, on the whole, are less inclined to offer a sympathetic ear to those who see the world through another lens. The teenage controversialist Owen Jones probably emerged from the womb denouncing Israel. Paul Mason,…

SOMETHING CALLING ITSELF the Gentleman’s Journal recently explained to readers that Wiltons restaurant on Jermyn Street offers a bar option where customers can pop in for champagne and oysters rathr than commit to “a full sit-down meal”. Wiltons has long been the Establishment’s establishment, where Nannies in wildly unflattering uniforms served comfortable club food to power with arch side-orders of nursery scolding. Founded as an oyster stall on Haymarket by William Wilton in 1742, it tootled to its present location in 1984 and has remained aloof to fads and fashions ever since. The velvet curtain at the door coddled an opulent, timeless space which benevolently insulated the haves from the world’s alarms. The Nannies were introduced by Jimmy Marks, who managed the restaurant for many years, famously refusing to get…

OVER DINNER RECENTLY, I WAS asked by the lady on my left “What opportunities do you see in the art market today?” I demurred. She pressed, “Where would you have wanted to buy in the marketplace over the past few years?” I felt fairly sure where the question was directed, but wanted to be sure. “What’s your aim when buying art? What are you looking for in an opportunity?” I countered. Then came the dreaded ‘i’ word: “investment”. My dinner companion saw buying art in terms of financial return, a rational value-based approach. “Ah. Well, if you are serious about investment, don’t buy art,” I replied. She was rather disappointed. No doubt she imagined I would reveal some clever Brazilian artist whose art is under-appreciated, affordable and will increase in…

AS REGULAR READERS WILL KNOW, THIS ISN’T A tipping column. First, because I am useless (the only time I have ever written a tipping column it was called Mug Punter, which said it all) and second, because there is a long lead time between me writing these words and you reading them, which makes it almost impossible to offer reliable information. We don’t even know which races some horses will run in. But in the three years I’ve been sharing my thoughts on racing, a tradition has emerged — that when it comes to Cheltenham, I ignore all that and go for it. And, if I say so myself, I’ve not done too badly. Last year I pointed you to a treble: Lossiemouth at 8/11, Fact To File at 5/2 and…