The new Puritans don't understand the joy of drinking
For the next three days, You and Yours on Radio 4 will be looking into diets and healthy eating and drinking. In one of the programme's most distressing revelations, the presenter Dr Michael Mosley,...
View ArticleNo, you can't get away with sending a text to thank someone for a present....
There are few pleasures more quietly satisfying than receiving a handwritten thank-you letter through the post. In an age when the world and his wife are tweeting and poking from left, right and...
View ArticleOxbridge will get worse if it discriminates against public schools
Dr Anthony Seldon, headmaster of Wellington College, has told the Telegraph that 62 of his pupils were clever enough to get an Oxbridge interview at Oxbridge, but he expected only 20 to get in. 'From...
View ArticleThe British stiff upper lip is wobbling
A new report by King's College London and University College London has suggested that the British stiff upper lip explains lower British cancer survival rates. For fear of making a fuss, we don't...
View ArticleThe 'strivers and shirkers' narrative is a misleading and ridiculous...
There has been a lot of tiresome talk this winter about strivers and shirkers, the first lot being characterised as people who work hard and are eager to get ahead, be upwardly mobile and give their...
View ArticleDave is a master of illusion. If being Prime Minister doesn't work out,...
The art of the conjurer is to direct attention towards something that doesn’t matter and away from what he is actually doing. On the evidence of what happened at the EU budget summit last week, David...
View ArticleWhy I believe in the wisdom of pipe smoking
From Thursday's Daily Telegraph Harold Wilson was rarely seen in public without his pipe. It was part of his persona, like Churchill with his fat cigar. He used it as a prop when he was interviewed on...
View ArticleFriendship and penitence on death row
I have been visiting the US a lot in recent years, for one reason or another. This month I travelled to Boston to hear performances of my chamber opera Clemency at the Boston Lyric Opera. The starting...
View ArticleThe Pope is one of the last intellectuals in high office
With the departure of Pope Benedict XVI, the IQ count of public life has collapsed. Along with his seriousness, shyness and charm, the former professor of Freising College, Bonn University, Tubingen...
View ArticleThe O'Brien moment: a spiritual leader in Edinburgh
Cardinal Keith O'Brien has been forced into retirement slightly earlier than expected. If the accusations against him are false then we've seen a despicable use of media power to spread lies and cause...
View ArticleThe Conclave, the Cardinal, the Chateau … and homosexuality
'The Church is perfect, the spotless Bride of Christ; it is individual members who sin', so traditional Catholic theology would tell us. From this viewpoint arises the imperative to protect the Church...
View ArticleJesuit! The new Pope
S.J. Those two letters indicating that their holder is a member of the Society of Jesus might, in earlier times, have been the cause for fear or dismay at this time. But since the 2nd Vatican Council...
View ArticleOne rude Archbishop, two kind pianists and endless steaming hotpot
Robert Mickens, in his column 'Letter from Rome' in last week's Tablet magazine, describes an experience he had during the Conclave with an Italian archbishop who heads one of the Vatican's major...
View ArticleThe idiotic academics who don't want children to learn anything
In today's Telegraph, there is a letter from a group of academics that beggars belief. In it, the various professors attack Michael Gove's proposed curriculum for consisting "of endless lists of...
View ArticleThe horror! Smythson, the Royal stationers advised by Samantha Cameron, don't...
Imagine my horror when I received an email from Smythson – stationers with three Royal warrants and still advised by their former creative director Samantha Cameron – that started "Dear Mr William...
View ArticleAbu Qatada might be a bearded maniac, but that's not a legal reason to deport...
Last year Rod Liddle wrote a piece in The Spectator in which he declared that “bearded maniacs deserve justice, too”. One of the bearded maniacs in question was Abu Qatada whom the Home Secretary has...
View ArticleTeachers who hate knowledge – the horror! the horror!
It was bad enough last week when 100 deluded academics wrote to the Telegraph, attacking the idea of teaching children lists of facts, rules and spellings. Now, even more scarily, the teachers...
View ArticleThe aristocracy has always loved new blood
From Tuesday's Daily Telegraph Emma McQuiston should prepare herself for a massive change when she marries Viscount Weymouth in June. It’s not just that the 26-year-old beauty will, in time, become the...
View ArticleChildren should learn from grown-ups. Not the other way round
It's ludicrous enough that Paris Brown, an unremarkable 17-year-old, should be given £15,000 of public money to act as a youth police and crime commissioner for Kent, particularly at a time when the...
View ArticleThe greatest ever peacetime Prime Minister – even her nastiest enemies will...
And so, the fondest, most respectful of farewells to the greatest Prime Minister of this country since Churchill. She will, naturally, get her due praise from a large section of the commentariat. And...
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