Society

The decisive culture war of the 21st century is likely to be between the Darwinian fundamentalists and those who believe in God and the significance of human life. It will be prolonged and bitter. Culture wars do not usually end in bloodshed but they break hearts and minds and bring terrible sufferings to the losers (and to many of the winners too). Most observers today would put their money on the Darwinians. They already control the universities of the West, or at least their science departments, and persecute with ferocity any who deviate from their narrow orthodoxies. Such heretical scholars — whatever their qualifications or the strength of their arguments

The moment after I stepped on the treacherously transparent black ice on the Newcastle garden path, my buttocks were on the ground and my heels in the air. I needed an 87-year-old to pull me up and get me into the waiting taxi. As the pain got more excruciating I sought to dull it with a promise to myself that became a mantra: no endless hours on a trolley. The alternative was a taxi to the airport, a wheelchair on to the plane to Hamburg, and back to Schwerin, the north-east German town where I work. By seven the following morning I was outside the accident doctor’s practice there. ‘We’re

My father was about as English as they come. Though he was born and educated in Australia, he talked like an Englishman, dressed like an Englishman, and behaved as he thought an English gentleman would behave, which was several degrees better than the real thing. His manner was as easy, affable and unflappable as any true-born Englishman’s. A homegrown Englishman would have seen through him in a trice, as my father found to his cost when he was seconded to the RAF during the second world war, but to Australians he seemed more English than the English. No one is born a cliché; you have to grow into it, as

Usher, who is no relation of Poe’s unfortunate family, has, I hear, decreed that jeans and trainers are not enough. Usher is an African-American singer, with a new interest in gentility. He is shocked by people not saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and he is disgusted by ‘profanity’. Profanity in this context is language of the kind used after 9 p.m. on the television. It means rude words that are not necessarily blasphemous — you know the f-word, and mother, though Americans, even of a gangsta disposition, seem less given to the c-word. Profanity is not literally ungodly, but then nor is swearing, for to say f—– is no more

I am taking my mother’s cousin Norma and her husband Harry out to lunch and I want them to have a good time, not just because I love Norma to bits but also because… nope, that’s it actually. She used to babysit us when we were little and would make us eat our supper backwards, saying if we didn’t finish our ice-cream there would be no main course, absolutely not, no way, and even though our bedtime was meant to be 8 p.m. we’d all still be up at midnight when she would shout: ‘All of you… time for… CAKE! And I mean IT!’ So I loved Norma then and

For the Beach Boys it was California Girls who were sans pareil. For Chas and Dave it was the Girls of London Town. But this column is dedicated to the girls of Merseyside. On Grand National Day at Aintree, it was wet and windy. Umbrellas turned inside out, racecards disintegrated to sodden pulp, rain seeped down inside your collar. But everywhere you turned there they were in their wispy little bits of silk and lace, spray-tanned midriffs frequently on view, dressed nine out of ten of them for a summer evening’s dance floor and still loving every minute of it. It was a pity that Carrie Ford, the 33-year-old mother