Robert Adès teaches A-level psychology in London.
38 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Natasha Feroze reports on the return of ex-Labour MP Keith Vaz (1:10); Robert Ades presents the case against sociology A-level (7:39); Lucasta Miller reviews Katherine Bucknell’s book, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out (15:24); Sam McPhail provides his notes on the lager Madri (23:16); Toby Young explains why he will be voting
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Oscar Nemon’s statue of Sigmund Freud at the Tavistock Clinic glares out with such a contemptuous look of superior knowledge that Freud’s housekeeper told him it made him look too angry. ‘But I am angry,’ replied Freud. ‘I am angry with humanity.’ Meanwhile, the cover image of Adam Phillips’s new book on psychoanalysis is a
The Budapest Festival Orchestra and founder Ivan Fischer have a reputation for exciting and joyous performances of Mahler. Even in this most tragic of symphonies, Fischer gave a grateful, if slightly sparse, audience exactly what they wanted. Fischer and his orchestra’s talent was in the delivery, in the work’s ravishing tableaux, and not in its
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Donald Winnicott once told a colleague that Tolstoy had been perversely wrong to write that happy families were all alike while every unhappy family was unhappy in its own way. It is illness, Winnicott said, that could be dull and repetitive, while in health there is infinite variety. Winnicott was reared in an environment of
