When family friends asked what I was doing these days when I disappeared after my A-Levels, my father would reply, “He’s in Cambridge,” and leave it at that. A few years later, to concerned relatives he would say, “He’s working off Berkeley Square now.”

If crowds of far-right protesters were gathering outside primary schools for weeks on end — and instrumentalising their children in the process — to noisily oppose race and religious equality teaching, we would definitely be outraged. And if those protesters downloaded spurious material from the internet to support their case, spreading false information throughout the …

Every nation has its downfall. The people of Aad. The ancient Egyptians. Our own downfall is inevitable, when we will be wiped from the earth, leaving only traces behind us. But where some left great pyramids and others palaces carved into mountains, wouldn’t it be a tragedy if the monuments we left for the millennia …

Before you heed the activist’s call, verify that they are telling the truth. More often than not, they are not, mixing truth and falsehood at best.

We were joined to break our fast last night by a secular liberal Israeli Turkish Jewish family. It was an interesting experience.

In every generation it is the same. The young zealot looks on at his elder in disdain, condemning him for his moderation and nuance. Years pass by, and the young zealot morphs into the mellow elder, castigating his younger self for its immature reckonings on matters of life and death. Ah, but now today’s young …

On this day, twenty-one years ago, after a Bank Holiday weekend spent in contemplation, I ventured out on foot from my flat opposite King’s Cross station to wander the streets of London, through Bloomsbury and Holborn, and on into the West End. As I passed through Covent Garden, winding between the last of the weekend’s …

While all the people were listening, Jesus said to his disciples, “Beware of the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ …

I do not know what the scholarly types — so exercised on social media this week — are wittering on about this time, and nor do I care. I’m past being bamboozled by the apparition of intellectualism. I’m convinced that the sacred knowledge industry is the source of half our woes. Between the proliferation of …

I don’t really know where to go, and who to hang out with anymore. But then, on reflection, I realise I never did. I’m just an older, greyer version of the kid at school who would wander round and round the school grounds, aimlessly, alone, pretending to go somewhere, though fully conscious that I was …

Oh, my ego has been bruised. Somebody was looking for Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” published by the Folio Society in 1971. They typed “the idiot folio” into their search engine and Google suggested me. Naturally, I am mortally offended, but in truth Google is right. Feelings are of no concern to the algorithms that index our …