Here is another installment in the on-going story of religious people demanding immunity from criticism for religion and religious people. This one is more irritating than most because so full of heavy-handed sneering (I like my sneering to be done with a light touch, thank you). Chattering classes, bien pensants, choking on their ciabatta – alliterative but crude. And then there’s the ever-popular rhetorical move of deciding what people’s motives are.

Why is baiting Christians a sport among the so-called bien pensants? Because the bien pensants most enjoy and benefit from the status quo, and sense, in the Christian, a subversive element who seeks to destroy their lifestyle.

Err – no. I for one don’t ‘bait’ Christians, but I … Read the rest

I’m a sucker for situations like the one Colin McGinn describes in this article in Prospect. People from what he calls ‘an academically disinclined background’ who get their minds awakened as adolescents, and develop and keep intellectual interests of some sort. I always find that setup tremendously moving.

There is for instance a beautiful bit in the movie ‘Gods and Monsters’ in which the director James Whale, played stunningly by Ian McKellen, ponders his own mysterious emergence from a grimly unaesthetic background. Where did he get all that imagination and love of beauty, he wonders, in McKellen’s beautiful reedy voice. ‘How did I get that way, where did it come from?’ He’s not denigrating his parents, merely wondering at his … Read the rest

This is a hilarious bit of reading. (Which I would have missed, despite entrenched habit of perusing the Guardian, but for Norm Geras’ always-interesting site, where you can vote for your own favourite novels, to the tune of three.) Lashings of sarcasm and mockery in Catherine Bennett’s look at Jane Root, BBC2, and the Big Read.

To ignore books is easy. So is burning them. You just need a match. But to make independent reading sound dull and great books look stupid, to transform literature into a vehicle for celebrities, polls, lists, voting opportunities and confected rivalries, to get books confidently debated by experts who have never read them, to set up a competition between Winnie the Pooh and War