The Week

Leading article

What the census misses about Christianity in Britain

When asked about their religion in a census, many British people have the same response: that it’s none of the government’s business. For a while, as a joke, tens of thousands stated their faith as ‘Jedi’, a fictional order of knights from Star Wars. Nevertheless, this year’s figure marks an important trend: just 46 per

Portrait of the week

Diary

My week of dining with the enemy

Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s First Lady, is a remarkable woman. I listened to her in a packed meeting room in Westminster as she talked of repeated rape and sexual torture. This is what ‘liberation’ means in Russian. She spelled out how Vladimir Putin is using the desecration of women on an industrial scale. Women as old

Ancient and modern

Plato and the problem with Netflix’s Atlantis

Whatever Netflix touches will almost certainly turn into trash. It’s the only way they know how to make money. In its latest example, it takes the fictional story of a ‘lost city’ called Atlantis and turns it into a ‘documentary’, a crock of evidence-free eyewash about a world-saving intellectual master-race. It was Plato (d. 348 bc)

Barometer

What was in the Wellcome Collection’s Medicine Man exhibition?

Not Wellcome The Wellcome Collection closed its own Medicine Man exhibition on the history of medicine, complaining that it was racist. Some of the treasures it displayed: – Wax and cloth head of Elizabeth I, half of which shows a face and the other half a decomposing skull being consumed by insects. – Pair of bellows used

Letters

Letters: Why I left the Society of Authors

Write and wrong Sir: As a former member of the Society of Authors I read with interest Julie Bindel’s article about its failure to defend J.K. Rowling when she received death threats (‘Write-off’, 26 November). I asked on the society’s ‘Children’s Writers and Illustrators’ Facebook page why they had not spoken out in support of