Michael Henderson

Fran Lebowitz, the apparently acid-tongued commentator on Manhattan manners, will slip through British customs next month to dazzle the easily dazzled. Though to judge by the interview she granted an earnest lady in the Observer, other verbs leap to mind. From this distance it looks suspiciously like a fog of self-regard. According to the profiler, Megan Nolan, Lebowitz is ‘a poster girl for a certain kind of crusty but erudite and essentially good-natured New York archetype, intellectual and judgmental, and walking the line between rudeness and frankness with engaging grace’. Cor! Is this a private ritual between consenting adults, or can we all join in?

‘You can always tell a proper lover of cricket’, Michael Kennedy, the great music critic, liked to say. ‘It’s whether they can appreciate a draw.’ A hit, a palpable hit. By concluding a magnificent Test series at two matches each, after India’s victory in the fifth game at the Oval, even England’s disappointed players may nod in agreement. They fell seven runs short, but nobody lost. Everybody who took part in this contest of equals should feel proud. ‘Proper’ cricket-lovers will have no doubt, for this contest was one for the annals. All five matches went into the fifth day, and India eventually prevailed by the tightest winning margin in their history after Mohammed Siraj, their leonine fast bowler, took his fifth wicket, and ninth in the match.

The Proms – the BBC Proms, to stick a handle on its jug – remains a good deed in a naughty world. Eight weeks of orchestral music, mainly, performed nightly at the Royal Albert Hall by artists from every continent, for as little as £8 if you are prepared to stand. One of those artists, the Georgian fiddler Lisa Batiashvili, supplied the highlight of this year’s ‘first night’ with a mighty performance of the Sibelius concerto. The concert ended with Sancta Civitas, a rarely heard choral work by Ralph Vaughan Williams, performed with love by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under its principal conductor, Sakari Oramo. Musically, it was a good start, despite the tiresome clapping between movements of the Sibelius. So why did the occasion, carried live on BBC2, fall flat?

The Irish problem has existed for centuries, though the nature of that problem is not always easy to define. It used to be political, though relations between English and Irish people on a personal level have usually been harmonious. There are still political problems, because identity – the question of to whom we owe our loyalty – shapes lives and creates communities. But now there is a different problem, and it’s one-sided. Many English people are suddenly keen to present an ersatz Irishness to the world, as a form of civic virtue, to the point of claiming citizenship. Some claim to feel ‘European’, in a vague way. Others feel that being green offers the swiftest route to an ill-defined ‘romanticism’. Ah yes, it’s that old favourite, the Celtic twilight!

A great Test match at Headingley on Tuesday, the first of five this summer against India, brought a famous victory for England’s cricketers. Required to make 371 – a target they had surpassed only once in history – they got there at 6.30 p.m. on the fifth afternoon for the loss of five wickets. It was a thrilling occasion, to which the Indians contributed five centuries. No team, in any first-class match, had ever supplied five century-makers and lost. What a triumph for Ben Stokes, the captain, who asked India to bat on the first morning. No challenge, it seems, is beyond them.

Pop music criticism, said Frank Zappa, was the work of people who can’t write, about people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read. Half a century later and he’s still right. Although pop is essentially a juvenile art form – its clearest strength and most obvious weakness – that doesn’t stop reviewers pumping up performers as though Johann Sebastian Bach had decided to form an all-star band with Beethoven and Brahms. The Three Bs! Sign ’em up! The current pop reviewers for the Times and the Telegraph, Will Hodgkinson and Neil McCormick, clearly think they bear witness to giants. Like Pinky and Perky, these mature teenagers can trill ‘we belong together’, batting balls over the net in a contest of perfumed superlatives.

‘Another pint of bitter, love, when you’re ready.’ To those of a certain age the request slips off the tongue like the opening line of a sonnet. A pint of bitter is as English as the first cuckoo of spring or the last rose of summer. It brings to mind a pub, the people in it, and that social phenomenon which binds us to those we trust – the round. And, of course, one pint may lead to another. Television adverts used to be full of jolly pint-swillers. Whitbread ‘Big Head’ Trophy Bitter was ‘the pint that thinks it’s a qua-art’. Tetley of Leeds, a big player in those days, introduced viewers to their ‘Bittermen’, with the declaration: ‘You can’t beat ’em.

There is nowhere in May more beautiful than England with the hawthorn out, the clear light and a thousand shades of green. And there is nowhere more beautiful in England than Glyndebourne, the Sussex opera house between the Downs and the coast. Every visit to the ancestral pile of the Christie family brings joy and we lucky folk who caught the new production of Parsifal were granted double rations. Wagner’s final music drama is a first for Glyndebourne and completes a triptych of the Master’s late work, following productions of Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. As Larkin wrote of Sidney Bechet: ‘Oh play that thing!

Trent Alexander-Arnold is a gifted footballer. Twice he has helped Liverpool become champions of England. He was also an important member of the team that became champions of Europe, and he has played 33 times at right back for England. Alexander-Arnold is still only 26. His race is nowhere near run. He has, one may safely say, power to add. And how did Liverpool supporters receive him when he came on as a second-half substitute against Arsenal over the weekend? Touched by the sun, thousands hooted their disapproval. The ‘Anfield faithful’, to borrow one of those sentimental phrases that come so easily to lazy scribes, let the player know that he could, in fact, walk alone. Charmers all.

The decline of Radio 3 makes a sad story. Established in 1967 to reflect the world of classical music, and high culture in general, it has become a swamp of mediocrity, peopled by presenters who might feel more comfortable on a pick ’n’ mix stall. Every day, in almost every way, it seems determined to forfeit the goodwill of listeners who remember what public service broadcasting used to sound like. Last week, building up to International Women’s Day, the station fluttered its feathers like a randy peacock. The Kanneh-Mason family, those latter-day Von Trapps, were on parade, and there were lashings of featherweight female composers. In the case of Florence Price, a favoured daughter, featherweight is possibly a division too steep.

When Herbert von Karajan was at his celestial height in the 1960s, juggling conducting duties at the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival, his musicians liked to tell a joke. ‘Karajan gets in a taxi, and the driver asks, “Where to?” Karajan says, “It doesn’t matter, they want me everywhere.”’ Not bad for a German joke. You want to dump on Trump? Send for Schama! A fresh look at Rembrandt? There’s a professor at Columbia who knows everything! Who is the Karajan of our day, hopping from gig to gig with the assurance of the born maestro? It must be Simon Schama, historian supreme, and transatlantic darling of the telly. You want to dump on Trump? Send for Schama! A fresh look at Rembrandt?

‘We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.’ Bob Dylan took his leave of our shores last week at the Royal Albert Hall, with 5,000 people cheering him on a victory lap. Dylan is 83 and too frail to stand unsupported for long. He occasionally needs notes for his lyrics, but he will never surrender. I’m a performer, he seemed to say throughout every minute of the hour and 40 minutes he was on stage, and performers perform. I’m a performer, he seemed to say throughout every minute of the hour and 40 minutes he was on stage, and performers perform It's fairly clear we won’t see him again. The three nights at the Kensington Bowl ended the British leg of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, which seems to have been going on since the relief of Mafeking.

We’re approaching the home straight at the Proms. There are three weeks to go at the world’s greatest festival of music, and Prommers are counting down the days until the famous orchestras of Berlin, Munich and Prague reach the Royal Albert Hall. The friendly foreign invasion has become the traditional climax to eight weeks of music-making. It’s been a better season in the hall than the one which appeared on paper, though the opening night was vin ordinaire. Clara Schumann’s pretty piano concerto turned out to be pretty dull. It’s not a piece that should open a festival of this pedigree. The pianist was a poor choice, too, but we shall come to Isata Kanneh-Mason anon.

Ian Chappell, the flinty Australian captain, has said that after giving cricket to the world the English did nothing further to develop the game. That original gift, it might be argued, was a fairly significant bequest, but Chappell could point to postwar history. In his lifetime, cricket has been shaped by Australians, West Indians, and Indians. Oh, the ghastliness of English football! The dim players, detached from the world in their grim mansions It is harder to challenge the view that the English, who codified the laws of Association Football in 1863, have spent the last century resting on their oars. The national team has won the World Cup once, in 1966, when the country served as host, and has never won the European Championship, though that may change this week.

Amelia ‘Milly’ Gentleman, the Guardian’s fearless investigative reporter, has ‘exclusively’ revealed some of the Garrick Club’s filthy secrets. It’s ‘the final gasps’ of ‘a declining patriarchal elite’, she writes. ‘A lonely slice of an England that forgot to modernise’. All over the country, fair-minded folk must be thinking ‘woo, when can I join?’   Clubmen tend to talk about the subject that occupies people wherever they gather: the crooked timber of humanity What is the club’s original sin? To be an all-male enclave deep within the Establishment, which draws its members from the Inns of Court, Whitehall, Westminster, the City, and the West End. What? Judges, senior civil servants, bankers, and famous mummers quaffing and scoffing at the Garrick!