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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

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Arts

Moral and political dilemmas

Robert Gore-Langton talks to Ronald Harwood about musical life in Nazi Germany

Apocalypse now

The TV programmes you watched as a child are like acid flashbacks.

Enchanted forest

Hänsel und Gretel
Royal Academy of Music

Jenufa
Birmingham Hippodrome

Pelléas et Mélisande
Sadler’s Wells

Caught by chance on Remembrance Sunday, the broadcast of the composer’s celebrated recording of War Requiem kept me hooked, listening with half an ear, half fascinated, half repelled, for the whole duration of a trip down memory lane, recalling the wave of patriotic fervour and heart-on-sleeve emotion surrounding the work’s première, 1962, in the new Coventry cathedral.

The fall guy

Break out the bunting. Crack open the champagne. Spit-roast the capon and prepare to party. Or, come to think of it, don’t bother.

Arts

Sting in its tale

Changeling
15, Nationwide

Lost treasure

Books

Stars bright and dim

State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

How to write a wrong

‘When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.’

Style & Travel

Pink and potent

Never gamble your pension on a food fashion.

Stocking- filler fizz

Stuck for stocking-filler ideas and feel like raising an insouciant middle finger to the credit crunch?

Brown has played into the hands of the Tory Bullingdon Boys he loathes

Fraser Nelson says that the Pre-Budget Report killed off New Labour without landing a punch on the Tories. It has paved the way for a new Conservatism, in which Cameron woos aspirational voters, focuses on government debt and looks for responsible spending cuts

Fraser Nelson