World

Danny Kruger’s brave defence of Christianity in the history of this country, which he recently delivered to an empty House of Commons, has won much praise. His words reminded me of when the same thing happened the other way round. As fourth-century Rome was Christianised by imperial decree, the distinguished senator Symmachus spoke up for the old pagan religion which had been degraded by the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Senate. He expressed his thoughts in the voice of the city herself, thus (Gibbon’s translation): ‘Pity and respect my age, which has hitherto flowed in an uninterrupted course of piety. Since I do not repent, permit me

In August 1945, Group Captain Leonard Cheshire was stationed on the Pacific island of Tinian as an official British observer of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two decades later, he wrote for The Spectator about his experience. For him, the attack on the two cities represented ‘the ‘destruction of the impotent by the invincible’. Nevertheless, he argued that the Allies had been ‘undeniably’ right to carry out the bombings since the attack ended ‘the most terrible war’ and prevented an extremely bloody invasion of Japan. By 1965, the emphasis in public discussion had shifted from ‘the suffering that the world was spared’ to the dead

Home A treaty with France came into operation by which perhaps 50 small-boat migrants a week could be sent back to France in exchange for asylum seekers in France with family connections to Britain. Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, could not say when the returns would begin. The number of migrants arriving in England in small boats in the seven days to 4 August was 1,047; the total for the year reached more than 25,000 at a faster rate than ever. The population of England and Wales rose by 706,881 in a year, the Office for National Statistics estimated, to 61.8 million by June 2024, of which only 29,982 was