This month’s Wine Club has Henry Jeffreys in notably good company, Tom Harrow, better known as the WineChap, in town for Burgundy Week and armed with a trio of Italians that cheerfully make the case for looking south rather than east.

While the merchants of St James’s are earnestly pouring tiny glasses of rain-thinned Pinot Noir and murmuring about yields, here we are with bottles that feel gloriously, unapologetically alive. Tom’s also takes us along on his journey into wine, via schoolboy tastings at Millfield, a spell in the army, Lee & Sandeman, and eventually Honest Grapes. The sort of anecdotes that make you wish wine education were still considered an acceptable extracurricular for fourteen-year-olds. As he puts it, learning to smell properly is a life skill criminally underrated.

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This week, Chris and Tom are joined by Critic associate editor, Patrick Porter, to talk Cricket. Fresh from another disappointing Ashes series, England seem lacking and out of ideas - except for one, the high-velocity aggressive style known as “Bazball”. The only problem being its not actually bringing England much success on the field.

The failure the net Test wins is compounded, Patrick argues, by the corporatised, Year Zero philosophy of a team which thinks it has nothing to learn from the past. This arrogance, rejecting outright the notion they have anything to learn from the great England cricketers of the past, and obsession with Moneyball-esque sporting fads, will only lead to more failure.

Patrick also brings to the show his specialism in International Relations, asking if the shock of Trump’s threatening behaviour focuses European minds on longer term strategic realities, then he’ll be the president Europe needs and whether they are about to embark on a costly rediscovery of why great power competition existed in the first place.

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In this episode of The Critic Show, Tom and Chris discuss Samuel Rubinstein’s review of Sir Lenny Henry’s new book The Big Payback, which calls for Britain to pay £18.62 trillion in reparations in penance for its colonial legacy.

Whilst economically absurd, and historically myopic, ideas like these are rapidly gaining credibility in the western world, and within the British Labour party in particular, in thrall to the politics of celebrity.

With the Chagos handover baked in, are proposals like this, though economically ruinous, inevitable?

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For decades, Nigel Farage was the ultimate political outsider, yet, after a year of topping the polls by some margin, it is slowly dawning on Westminster that, for the first time in a century, he might break the two-party system.

How has he been able to do this? And why are the political currents of the mid-twenty twenties so different from the waters that UKIP swam in a decade before?

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Has western policy-making been broken by AI? Andrew Orlowski thinks so. The writer and journalist believes that our governing elites have become obsessed by artificial intelligence and Large Language Models in particular, yet, he argues, these technologies have singularly failed to live up to their promise.

Orlowski explains how the techno-utilitarian impulse behind this obsession also has much deeper roots, and many its advocates are entwined in a modern day cult of twisted morality.

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The creaking edifice of British politics, without urgent intervention, is about to come crashing down. But enough about the Labour party, the Palace of Westminster is in a state of disrepair, and the cost of restoration is projected in the multiple billions. Why? And why can’t we seem to get architecture right in this country anymore?

To answer this, and so much more, Tom is joined this week by Nicholas Boys Smith, founder of Create Streets, the design practice, town-builder and think tank, campaigning to bring beauty and liveability back to our built environment.

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Whilst the high culture of classical art and music has often been associated with conservatism, there has, nevertheless, been a slow decline of culture on the right. Nearly every single great cultural institution is effectively owned and operated by the left, and rightist attempts to create art and institutions of their own have been somewhat underwhelm…

This week, Chris Bayliss and Poppy Coburn discuss Britain’s new command economy, and why the free market is anything but.

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Chris Bayliss and Tom Jones if Britain’s punishment system is really that broken, and if our authorities are giving up on crime and punishment

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Fleur Meston and Poppy Coburn talk about how much the Overton Window has shifted in the last year, and how the continuing political rhetorical war around immigration proves the radical right are anything but.

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