If the visuals left us baffled and disappointed, the musical performance reached toward the stars. The superb soprano Marlis Petersen delivered a sensitive, nuanced Marschallin that captured the character’s emotional dilemmas with a pathos unseen since Renée Fleming gave up the role five years ago.

Rarely, if ever, does Christopher Ricks raise a point without matching it with some apt snippet of verse. Or, rather, rarely does Ricks raise a point at all; instead he discovers, within the verses of poets, the point he himself would like to raise and consider, so that reading a Ricks essay can become a game of hide-and-seek as the critic dodges and peeks from between the curtains of carefully selected verse.

We witnessed a prolonged curtailment of freedom of movement, freedom of association, and freedom of speech. But Mark Woolhouse does not address this. In fact, while he clearly comes out as lockdown sceptical, it is not entirely clear why.

Louise Perry is both predicting and calling for a counter-revolution, likely led by the “Gen Z women who have experienced the worst of it.”

The novel treats Britain’s past with the utmost respect it deserves; the regency world is presented to the reader in all its glory. Susanna Clarke does not betray its spirit by infusing it with modern culture, unlike so many other representations of the period.

Tobias Kratzer successfully framed the tale’s tension between the temptation of lustful vice and the promise of salvation as a modern ‘crise de conscience.’

Reading Sigrid Undset’s trilogy challenges readers to confront their own moral vacillations and need for constancy.

Hypersensitivity forces beauty into a politically-correct straitjacket. It is hardly surprising that such straitjackets kill beauty, for what cannot breathe, cannot live.

Oriental Jews may well have been discriminated against throughout Israel’s early decades, but Michale Boganim’s latest documentary vastly exaggerates their current plight.

If the Church as we know it is to survive, it must change course immediately. I have no doubt that in any future attempt to salvage what is left of it, Kwasniewski’s analyses will be invaluable.

The 2-hour documentary “Pandamned”by Dutch filmmaker Marijn Poels is a colossal undertaking aiming to summarize and assess overall socio-political developments of the past few years.

Continetti’s history of the first hundred years of the American right holds lessons for the next hundred.