Monday 23 March 2026 The voice of experience in matters of war is often a quiet one, but when it speaks plainly it can carry the weight of history. Leon Panetta, who has spent decades within the innermost circles of American intelligence and defence policy, has issued precisely such a warning in response to Donald Trump’s decision to embark upon war with Iran. His criticisms are not those of a partisan opponent, but rather those of a statesman alarmed by the re-emergence of f

Sunday 22 March 2026 The death of Robert Mueller, sixth director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigations, ought to have been an occasion for solemn reflection in the United States — a moment in which a republic, so often riven by faction, might briefly have remembered the quiet virtues that sustain the rule of law. Mueller was not a man of theatrical temperament. He did not seek applause, nor did he trade in slogans. He embodied something older, sterner and altogether more

Sunday 22 March 2026 There are moments in opera when the boundary between theatre and moral philosophy dissolves entirely—when the stage ceases to be a place of diversion and becomes instead a tribunal. Such is the enduring power of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni , a work that has, for more than two centuries, invited audiences to confront the spectacle of charisma unrestrained by conscience. Recently performed at the Lviv National Opera House, the opera acquires a re

Sunday 22 March 2026 In the early decades of the twenty–first century, one of the most widely discussed anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence concerned the fear that machines would render human labour obsolete. Writers imagined a future in which algorithms displaced lawyers, journalists, engineers and analysts. Yet the reality emerging from the widespread adoption of large language models has been more paradoxical. Rather than eliminating cognitive labour, artificial

Sunday 22 March 2026 There are certain works of art that do not belong wholly to the period in which they were created. They linger — half prophecy, half warning — awaiting the moment when their meaning becomes unavoidable. Amongst these is Mors Imperator , attributed to the German artist Von Preuschen, a sombre and unsettling allegory in which death is not merely an end but a sovereign. The painting presents a stark inversion of political order. The figure of Death — skeleta