V is for Vibrancy You know how it goes. You wait months for a depraved-gang-rape-and-child-prostitution trial —and then two come along at once: Asian grooming gang convicted of appalling acts of depravity on children Police and social services have apologised for the failings and missed opportunities that allowed a gang of men to carry out […]
Men and Miracles Here are four highly important Western thinkers. Please pick the odd one out: 1. St Thomas Aquinas (theologian). 2. Charles Darwin (biologist). 3. Stephen Jay Gould (biologist). 4. Richard Dawkins (biologist). The odd one out is of course No. 2, Charles Darwin, because he didn’t believe in miracles. By contrast, supernatural intervention […]
Enlightenment Values If you’ve ever handled a slug, you’ll know that you have to wipe your hands afterwards. It would be wrong to compare the British anti-fascist Denis MacShane with a slug – he’s not a hermaphrodite or a mollusc, after all – but contact with Denis has similar effects. You’ll have things to clean […]
Comrade Catholic Unstintingly generous with others, Tony Blair’s New Labour were sternly austere with themselves. While toiling to create thousands of new laws and regulations for the rest of us, for themselves they had a single stark and simple rule: “To the pure in heart, all things are permitted.” And who in New Labour […]
Languages never stay still. In one key dialect of modern English, meaning can be conveyed by the absence of adjectives. It happens with the nouns “man” and “men”, though you’ll also see it with nouns like “youth/s”, “teen/s”, and so on. Mentions of “men” are often men-shuns, because the media avoid describing the “men” any further. […]
