A recent Radio Four programme had a distinguished retired geneticist, who is also a devout Christian, pondering the virgin birth. Jesus, it turned out, is something of a biological conundrum. As...
The last time a ‘gentleman of the road’ cried ‘Stand and deliver!’ on an English highway is thought to have been in 1831. High tobymen, or horsed robbers, had yielded the...
George Carman QC, the best known British advocate of his time, died of cancer on 2 January last year. Shortly afterwards, the Daily Telegraph published an obituary which listed the famous...
Eamon Duffy’s celebrated The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400-c.1580 (1992), which opened our eyes to the vitality of late medieval English Catholicism, was a...
My starting point is one of the claims most widely accepted in current discussions about the theory of liberty. There is one overarching formula, we are told, under which all intelligible...
Given their importance as an instrument of social regulation, it’s odd that the law and law enforcement were so long cold-shouldered by historians. From the time of Blackstone, legal...
In the 1960s we used to sing a music-hall song in the pub whose rousing refrain began, ‘Two lovely black eyes – Oh, what a surprise!’ and went on: ‘Only for tellin’...
I do wish Donald Davidson would write a book. I mean, a proper book with a beginning, a middle and an end, in contrast to the collections of papers of which the present volume is an instance. My...
For at the common law . . . his fault was not to be wrung out of himself, but rather to be discovered by other means, and other men. William Blackstone, Commentaries If you were...
On 28 May 1919, the residents of Moscow woke to find that the walls of the Strastnoi convent had been daubed with what at first glance might have appeared to be crude blasphemous slogans. More...
Like it or not, terrorist attacks will be a recurring part of our future. The balance of technology has shifted, making it possible for a small band of zealots to wreak devastation where we least...
Any argument about religion, whether conducted in the seminar room or the saloon bar, is likely to hit the buffers not just because people hold different religious beliefs but because they...
I never believed in God, not even between the ages of six and ten, when I was an agnostic. This unbelief was instinctive. I was sure there was nothing else out there but space. It could have been...
Blasphemy is still a crime in English law, though I imagine few now think it should be. A quarter-century has passed since anybody was charged with it, but another determined zealot like Mary...
Every now and then philosophers discover the virtues of common sense. This surprises their friends and delights their enemies. The surprise arises from philosophy’s traditional commitment...
On 22 November, judgment was handed down in a case brought against Macmillan and Danis Rose by the estate of James Joyce. Ulysses: A Reader’s Edition, edited by Rose, was published by...
In 1920 our ‘Mad Mullah’ was Mullah Yussuf Dua Mohammed. Ensconced in British Somaliland, he and his dervishes were the subject of repeated air attacks by an RAF unit. As A.W.B....
The Tibetan Government presently sits in exile in McLeod Ganj, a small town outside Dharamsala separated from Tibet itself by the ramparts of the Himalayas. The Dalai Lama escaped there in 1959,...