Society

How far do you think £321 would get you from London? Halfway across the world maybe? Asia? The US? All of these are possible if you hunt around for cheap flights. But in the wonderful world of UK train travel, £321 of your hard-earned cash buys you a return trip from London to Manchester, a mere 326-mile round-trip. There are cheaper train tickets, admittedly, but that’s the price a client paid for me to travel to Manchester to do a day’s (high standard and very reasonably priced) consultancy work for them. Their big mistake was not to book the ticket three months in advance or tie me to set trains

House prices moved up a gear in February, according to Nationwide, with property values increasing by 4.5 per cent in a year. The BBC reports on the building society’s latest house price index which also reveals that property prices were up by 0.6 per cent compared with the previous month, bringing the cost of the average home to £205,846. Both the monthly and annual rise are greater than in January, but the Nationwide does not expect house prices to rocket. It is forecasting a 2 per cent rise in UK house prices over the course of 2017. Jonathan Hopper, managing director of Garrington Property Finders, said: ‘It’s fast becoming less a battle of

I am quite used to people smirking into their sleeves when they hear that I’ve just written a book called The Islamic Enlightenment. The really helpful wags say they expect something along the lines of The Wit and Wisdom of Spiro Agnew, which was billed as a collection of all the memorable aphorisms of the former US vice-president, and contained only blank pages. So, the Islamic Enlightenment — good for a laugh. But we’re all familiar with the serious argument that lies behind the jests; that Islam has not been through an Enlightenment, a Reformation, or any of the other rites of passage that have formed our modernity, and that,

To my mind, a bookshop is like a library — the only difference is that you buy the books, you don’t borrow them. But both have a duty to provide books (space and budgets allowing) reflecting a wide range — as wide as possible — of interests, reading tastes, subjects and points of view. Walk into one of either and there are the thoughts and feelings, beliefs and dreams and creations and discoveries of many men and women, and that is part of their never-ending excitement. If you are, say, a Christian bookshop, and advertise yourself as such, or a Middle Eastern bookshop, or a communist or a feminist bookshop,

Everyone in London seems to be fuming all the time — although, to be fair, fuming has become the default setting of our time. Historically, it’s the sexually repressed, swivel-eyed Daily Mail reader who fumes hardest, but ever since last June 23, when the glorious chaotic dawn of Brexit was revealed, liberals have been fuming up a storm with all the parasexual frustration of fat-fingered One Direction fans tweeting hatred about the paternity of Cheryl’s baby. Tempering, tantruming and thweatening to thwceam till they’re sick, it’s hard not to feel that what’s making them the most angry isn’t the alleged racism of Brexiteers or the alleged financial ruin waiting just

Life in Britain has become much cruder, meaner and more spiteful practically everywhere. It can be seen in people’s behaviour on the street; in those abominable neighbours from hell; in companies piling up the profits with no care whatsoever for the degree to which they are sweating their workers on terms that, until quite recently, would have been unimaginable. The incivility of one to another can be seen most sharply and poignantly in the degree of cruelty to children which, at the beginning of my working life, would have had every alarm bell ringing wildly. Children have to be almost on the point of being murdered before they are taken