Damian Thompson is an associate editor of The Spectator
There is a paperback on my bookshelves with an inscription from Claus von Bulow, who died this week. ‘To Damian,’ it reads, ‘who is also quite innocent.’ The title of the book? Insulin Murders. This may surprise anyone old enough to remember the tragedy and the two trials that made Claus notorious in the early
At the Wigmore Hall last Friday, the Takacs String Quartet and Garrick Ohlsson played a piano quintet that was once revered as a masterpiece but then fell out of fashion and wasn’t heard for decades. It’s by Amy Beach, a name which always makes me smile because it looks so incongruous underneath her photograph. ‘Amy
Are Beethoven’s ‘Diabelli’ Variations really ‘the greatest of all piano works’, as Alfred Brendel claims? It’s hardly what you would call received wisdom. Even Stephen Kovacevich, who has given us two visionary recordings of the Diabellis, thinks some of the 33 variations are ‘boring’. I don’t agree, but I can understand why Brendel’s judgment seems
Have you noticed how nearly everyone in the media has won an award? Is there even such a thing as a documentary maker who isn’t ‘award-winning’? Most journalists my age have picked up some sort of bauble. I sulked about this for years until a colleague reminded me that I did have an award: Private
In the new Holy Smoke podcast episode, I finally get something off my chest. For 30 years I’ve been bored senseless by the public pronouncements of bishops – Anglicans and Catholics. Why do they feel the need to speak in such dreary jargon? Why do interesting clergy never make it to bishop? I’m joined by
The publication of In the Closet of the Vatican by the French gay polemicist Frédéric Martel has been meticulously timed to coincide with Pope Francis’s ‘global summit’ of bishops to discuss the sexual abuse of minors. The book appeared in eight languages on Thursday morning, just as the gathering began. It is being hyped as
The photo above is of my sister Carmel and me having tea a few days after our mother’s funeral. She looks cheerful, doesn’t she? That’s because she was: although we both missed our mother intensely, and always will, we had done most of our grieving before she died, as we watched her tortured by Parkinson’s
Every Monday and Thursday afternoon when I was growing up, a drum roll would sound throughout suburban Britain. ‘Damian? Blue Peter!’ my mother would call out, in a voice that made it clear that my presence was required in front of the television. Blue Peter — 60 years old this week — was top of
Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of the Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who is under intense pressure to explain what he knew about his disgraced predecessor, the sex abuser and ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Wuerl had asked to resign. He knew his position was untenable: not only is there widespread scepticism about his claim
This is a slightly misleading headline for today’s Holy Smoke podcast, because Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith, Lara Prendergast and I didn’t spend a lot of time duscussing episcopal rudeness. The episode is actually about snobbery in church circles. Fr Alexander muses on clergy who name-drop like dowagers while Lara picks her way through the minefield of
I was at a funeral the other day at which the music was so inspiring that I struggled to feel sad. That’s fair enough, you may think — but the person in the coffin was my own mother. This is a difficult point to explain in cold print, but there are reasons why I wasn’t
The Catholic Church is confronting a series of interconnected scandals so shameful that its very survival is threatened. Pope Francis himself is accused of covering up the activities of one of the nastiest sexual predators ever to wear a cardinal’s hat: his close ally Theodore McCarrick, the retired Archbishop of Washington, DC. Popes John Paul
The allegation by a former senior Vatican diplomat that Pope Francis vigorously covered up sex abuse is looking more credible by the day. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former apostolic nuncio to the United States, says he told Francis in 2013 that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, retired Archbishop of Washington, was a serial abuser of seminarians. The
The allegation by a former senior Vatican diplomat that Pope Francis vigorously covered up sex abuse is looking more credible by the day. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former apostolic nuncio to the United States, says he told Francis in 2013 that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, retired Archbishop of Washington, was a serial abuser of seminarians. The Pope
Pope Francis stands accused this morning of covering up the crimes of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, one of the most senior and sinister sex abusers in the history of the Catholic Church. The allegation comes from the Vatican’s former apostolic nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, 77, who has called on the
A Pennsylvania grand jury report released last night has revealed that the Catholic Church in six dioceses systematically and sneakily covered up sexual abuse by priests on a horrifying scale. The American Church has now been plunged into the worst crisis in its history. The 884-report comes less than a month after the revelation that
The young writer Guy Stagg threw in his job a few years ago to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem via Rome – choosing a hazardous medieval route across the Alps. It nearly killed him: at one stage, trying to cross a broken bridge in Switzerland, he ended up partially submerged in the water, held up
All my life I’ve wanted to compose music, and now I’ve done it. I’ve written a sonata for solo flute that boasts two highly original features; it’s five hours long and must be performed by a badger. Though it took me only five minutes to write, my opus one is guaranteed to get through to
Only one pope in the history of the Catholic Church could have uttered the following words: ‘Juan Carlos, that you are gay does not matter. God made you like this and loves you like this and I don’t care. The pope loves you like this. You have to be happy with who you are.’ Speaking
Just before Ireland voted overwhelmingly to end the country’s constitutional ban on abortion, Catholics in the fishing village of Clogherhead could be seen storming out of Sunday mass halfway through the service. Why? Their parish priest had come on too strong. He had not only ordered them how to vote but also supplied grisly details