Homage to Bach
Bach came as close to sainthood as Luther could allow. We should all be grateful to a composer never surpassed.
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
Adam Smith: The Morality of the Invisible Hand
The Wealth of Nations should not be seen as separate from Smith's moral philosophy — it itself is a profoundly moral text
A Delicious Summer Sorbet
Sterling Clark's collection of French art, on show at the Royal Academy, is as appetising as it is unfamiliar
The Wagner Family Soap Opera Rolls On
'The Wagner family has never let Bayreuth and the festival out if its grip — today it is still run by two of Richard's great-granddaughters'
A Man for our Season
Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies is a dazzling exercise in literary ventriloquism, but it panders too much to modern sensibilities, painting Thomas Cromwell as a secular saint
From Art as Life to Blood and Soil
'While between 1895 and 1945 the German debate over how to be modern resulted in a global killing-field, a group of artists in Worpswede set down their visions for a 20th century
Interregnum Interrogator
God's Instruments is a coherent, elegant collection of essays that confirms Blair Worden as one of our finest historians of the English civil wars
No Life Was Untouched
Christy Campbell's focused, meticulous account of the V-weapon campaign of 1944 provides a neat counterpoint to the magisterial grand narrative of Antony Beevor's The Second World War
Blind Eye to the Evidence
Keith Lowe's attempt to blur the moral distinctions between Nazis and Jews makes Savage Continent as distasteful as it is misleading
Could Picasso Draw Better than Raphael?
Comparing Pablo Picasso's drawings to those of the Old Masters reveals his failure to master the basics of draughtsmanship
Melancholia, Not Modernism
Edvard Munch may have yoked new technologies together but his leitmotifs were timeless
Regenerate Art
From beneath Berlin's streets archeaologists have unearthed a reminder of Nazi oppression