Despite my deep interest in history, the commemoration of the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War last year prompted me to realise how little I knew about it. In order to fill in the gaps, I bought a book on the Great War and started reading it. Very soon I noticed a distinctive difference between what I thought…

The biblical readings we’ve just listened to are supposed to give me an easy ride either to moralistic rant based on the Ten Commandments (the first reading) or to a clichéd call for moralistic purging as derived from the Gospel reading. I considered that – by following either of these routes – I would be guaranteed the prospect of losing the…

The revelations in recent days about the so-called ‘Jihadi John’ have drawn our attention yet again to the process of the religious radicalisation of ordinary young people which turns them into murderous fanatics. Politicians, journalists, commentators and the general public try to understand why there are those ready to abandon their relative comforts in order to support an ideology which…

Many Western political leaders, both those in power and those in opposition, claim to have moral standards superior to those of Mr Putin, the Russian President. Russian involvement in the covert annexation of Crimea last year and in the ongoing war against a neighbouring independent country – at a steeply rising cost to human life – has been deliberately shrouded…