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In their La Scala style auditorium Grange Park Opera have just inaugurated a Wagner Ring Cycle. The Bayreuth festival in Germany was designed to stage this remarkable set of four operas, and in England the Longborough Festival have already given a complete Ring. It is a cycle well suited to summer festivals, and now Grange Park Opera have joined in with the first opera, Das Rheingold, which turned out to be a stunning success.

Member ratings This article has not been rated yet. Be the first person to rate this article. The themes that emerge from Christopher Bigsby’s interviews in The Arthur Miller Tapes (Cambridge UP, 322pp, £25/$30) are truthfulness and deception, betrayal and guilt, the origins of creativity, the dangers of fame, the temptations of the flesh, the corruption of Hollywood, the commercialisation of Broadway and the betrayal of American idealism.

Why do large modern opera houses decide to undermine the plots of well-established operas? I think the disease started in Germany, but it has certainly spread to England. Perhaps opera directors are over-compensated for their work, and get above themselves. Unlike composers and their librettists, they are not the creators of new work but simply put it on stage, and should be satisfied with that, rather than altering someone else’s creations.

On Friday morning’s Today programme on Radio 4 Anna Foster asked Andy Trotter, a retired chief constable, about the Government’s decision to keep the pubs open till 5 am on Monday morning for England’s World Cup match against Mexico. Was it a good idea? she asked. Mr Trotter gave a good answer. It obviously meant having more police on duty, he said, the combination of heat and too much drinking would lead to  trouble and, most interesting of all, there would be more domestic violence.

There is a tendency to suppose that chess has always been played with the same pieces upon the same board. This is not so. In various ancient forms of chess some quite exotic pieces made their appearance. In the Great Chess of Alfonso the Wise of Spain, and in the extended version of the game favoured by the world conqueror Tamburlaine, the ordinary menagerie of chess was enlarged.

One of the joys of summer country house opera in England is the immediacy of the experience. Unlike Covent Garden or the London Coliseum, both of which have auditoriums seating well over two thousand people, here one is enclosed in a far more intimate setting. And the acoustic at Longborough, set in the Cotswolds, is simply marvellous. When Verdi first created his opera Macbeth in 1847, one Italian critic complained that he didn’t know his Shakespeare, but this was insolent nonsense.

This Saturday, the United States turns 250. In the grand sweep of history, 250 years is barely a moment:  Rome lasted a millennium, China’s dynasties ran across thousands of years. Yet in that blink, a ragged collection of colonies became the largest and most consequential economy the world has ever seen, outpacing its competitors by miles. It wrote the rules, built the institutions and invited the world in, profiting from the architecture itself. At 250, it is worth pausing to marvel.

Secularist history “disappears” Christians, appearing embarrassed that Christians, and a society fundamentally shaped by Christianity, were responsible for significant social progress. The growth of secularism in the last century has resulted in the role of the Christian Churches in television coverage of history often being written out of the script. This is noticeable in otherwise well-made TV and radio documentaries, thankfully much less so in historical scholarship.

In 1846 off the coast of Mexico a young seaman aboard a two-masted US sailing ship struck an officer and was court martialed. The captain felt he had to condemn him to death, but asked forgiveness from the young seaman. His response was: “Yes sir, and I honour you for it. God bless the flag.” Four years earlier, aboard a US frigate, one midshipman and two petty officers were convicted of planning a mutiny, and hanged from the yardarm.

Member ratings This article has not been rated yet. Be the first person to rate this article. f Paul Celan, the Romanian-born Jewish poet of the Holocaust, and his Austrian lover Ingeborg Bachmann. A stranger and afraid In a world I never made. A.E. Housman Paul Celan (1920-70) is the Franz Kafka of modern poetry. Like Kafka in Czech-speaking Prague, Celan in the Romanian-speaking region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a depressed German-Jewish writer.