Conspiracy theory

Thursday

Susan Hill

Laughter is the key to surviving Christmas

Joy. Family. Love. Lights. Stars. Festivity. And yes, all of those, if you’re lucky, and they are happy words, words that give you that fuzzy glow. Others come fast down the track, of course. War. Disasters. Accidents. Distress. Tears.  I am old now so my most familiar Christmas word is ‘memory’, although I live in the present and ‘fun’ is definitely a Christmas word – but ‘funny’? Yet as I have been sitting by the log fire thinking about Christmases past, funny keeps cropping up.  I said, knife poised, that I hoped it wasn’t the steak pie we were about to eat with our cream or custard One should never laugh

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

How has the Conservative party’s ‘Dr No’ escaped everyone’s notice for so long?

The reason conspiracy theories are so resilient, reproducing themselves from one generation to another, is that they are unfalsifiable. Evidence against them, however solid, has obviously been faked. Anyone who tries to demonstrate that Americans did land on the moon or that J.F. Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald is obviously in the pay of people who stand to benefit. If you ask who those people are, since there seems to be no evidence of their existence, the answer is always the same: they are very good at concealing themselves. And so the theory finds credulous punters. To save time, I should probably point out that The Spectator, which