CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
Latest editorial
New album, new grandson and new festival to look forward to
What are they? Crumhorns
[Arnulf zu Linden/cc]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
I get some amusing musical questions as I charge round the country with my early-music-meets-punk-band Barnstormer 1649 large collection of obsolete instruments in tow.
The most common one is: “What’s that buzzy thing that looks like a walking stick?”
Well, it’s a crumhorn and it went out of fashion towards the end of the 17th century, replaced by the oboe, which sound a bit less like a demented bee on steroids.
Similar stories
The Bard does Bearded Theory, and lodges a complaint about bandnames
Two inspring books — that’s your New Year’s musing from me on January 2 2026
The Bard commutes to work for the first time in 45 years
Fiery words from the Bard in Blackpool and Edinburgh, and Evidence Based Punk Rock from The Protest Family