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Matthew Parris

If Jesus did not exist, the Church would not invent him

Many readers will have read The Spectator Easter survey — ‘Did Jesus really rise from the dead?’ — with intense interest. I did. The results of a survey posing the simple question, ‘Do you believe that Jesus physically rose from the dead?’ were sharply different from what I expected. Just one avowed atheist was interviewed,

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s Notes | 22 April 2006

Yes, the BNP is unpleasant and hate-filled. But why does everyone feel the need to say it so much? Or rather, why don’t people say it about all the other hate-filled organisations in this country, as well as about the BNP? The Socialist Workers Party is hate-filled; so is Respect, so is Hizb ut-Tahrir, so

Any other business

A noble lady who showed that virtue is its own reward

Truly good people have always been rarities, and ours is not an age which nourishes them by attention and respect. When a good person dies, it is not headline news but, rather, a private tragedy for friends, who thereby lose a beacon in their own confused and muddled lives, someone they could regard as a

Medicine and letters | 22 April 2006

I was about to write ‘Everyone knows the story of James Lind, the Scottish naval surgeon, who conducted the first controlled trial in the history of medicine to prove the curative value of citrus fruits in scurvy’ when I realised that it would have been a silly and, worse still, a snobbish thing to say.