Home The Duke of Edinburgh, aged 90, left Papworth Hospital in Cambridgeshire four days after arriving by helicopter for an emergency operation to fit a stent in a blocked coronary artery. ‘It is tragedy that often draws out the most and the best from the human spirit,’ the Queen said in her Christmas broadcast, recorded
At last, 18 years after leaving university, the call comes to appear on the University Challenge Christmas Special. A wonderful boost for my intellectual vanity. Not so good for the physical sort. Halfway through filming, at Granada Studios in Manchester, a man in props approached me in the make-up room. ‘I’m afraid you’re strobing,’ he
And so the ‘God’ particle may have been discovered. Or not. Ancient Greeks would have thought it a waste of time, since the rational intellect could deal only with what was humanly intelligible, and gods barely fitted that category. Anyway, as the philosopher Heraclitus said, everything was full of gods. So why bother? When the
100 candles Some of those who are due to be celebrating hundredth birthdays in 2012: 3 February Mary Carlisle, US actress who starred alongside Bing Crosby in Doctor Rhythm 8 April Alois Brunner, assistant to Adolf Eichmann, never brought to justice and still believed to be living under the name Dr Georg Fischer in Damascus 28 April Kaneto
The murder of a teenager on Boxing Day, stabbed during a brawl over a pair of trainers in Oxford Street, offers another horrifying glimpse of the culture of violence being incubated in our sink estates. Police have not yet confirmed if this was another gang killing, but it seems to fit a sickening pattern. There
Chiller app Sir: Niall Ferguson (‘On being called a racist’, 17/24 December) says that ‘the freedom of the press does not extend to defamation’. This is an odd idea, but one which Ferguson shares with the governments of those countries in which journalists are routinely imprisoned for insulting the powerful. In England, defamation is a
