Society

The bishops can smell blood in the water. Sensing how badly the Conservatives are doing in the polls, the two archbishops and 24 bishops of the Church of England in the House of Lords appear to have thrown aside any pretence of political objectivity and impartiality and have pitched themselves all-out against the government. This has been building up since the advent of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition in 2010, but the way that the bishops have taken their gloves off in the present session of parliament is shocking. Anglican bishops occasionally argue that they opposed the last Labour and coalition governments just as much as they do the present Conservative

For most people today radioactivity is synonymous with bright yellow warning signs, explosions and poison. But there was a time when radioactivity was revered, not feared. And when it seemed like everyone in Britain was clamouring for more of it.  In the late 19th century Wilhelm Röntgen discovered a previously unknown form of powerful radiation that was invisible to the human eye and so mysterious that he simply named it ‘X’. Working from Röntgen’s findings, the French engineer and physicist Henri Becquerel identified the phenomenon of radioactivity – both as a concept and as a force – and Marie Skłodowska Curie would later give it a name.   Radium also began

For reasons that not even Czechs can explain, in the past they developed a habit of throwing their rulers out of windows. It started in the early 15th century, but it was in Prague in 1618 that the word ‘defenestration’ entered the English language. The word derives from the Latin word for window, fenestra.  A year earlier the dying and childless Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, Mathias, named Ferdinand as his successor. Ferdinand II, a Jesuit educated zealot, immediately begun to row back on guaranteed protestant freedoms in Prague (Bohemia). On 23 May 1618, a group of angry protestant noblemen led a mob across the Charles Bridge and upward to Hradcany Castle. There

One August afternoon, my dad, my uncle, and I were walking along Hadrian’s Wall. It was pouring. Our shoes were full of water, our glasses had steamed up, and our pac-a-macs were sticking to our bodies.  Seemingly out of nowhere, we came upon a little dip in the cliff, within which was nestled a tall tree. We stopped under the cover of its wide branches and five-lobed leaves and ate our ham and cheese sandwiches. There was no one else in sight and we had this beautiful part of Northumberland to ourselves.  Thanks to an individual act of vandalism, the Sycamore Gap is now really a gap That tree was

The campaign to destroy GB News in Britain is precisely mirrored by a campaign to eliminate CNEWS, its French equivalent. The French political and media establishment would dearly like to shut down CNEWS which has overtaken #BFMTV (ipso facto BF Macron TV) as the most watched news station here. The campaign against CNEWS is intensifying since the channel has started routinely beating its establishment competitors. This seems also to be the case with GB News. The station’s refusal to conform to the groupthink of the establishment Parisian media blob is driving the bien-pensants mad. The accusation that it’s an extreme-right disinformation machine is absurd. It tilts right, but no more than