Damian Thompson is an associate editor of The Spectator
We’re closing 2017 by republishing our twelve most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 9: Damian Thompson on Pope Francis: On 2 January, the Vatican published a letter from Pope Francis to the world’s bishops in which he reminded them that they must show ‘zero tolerance’ towards child abuse. The next day, the American Week magazine
Imagine if we had access to over a hundred Shakespeare plays in which the Bard was at or near the top of his game – but we didn’t bother to watch them and couldn’t even remember their names. Bach has as good a claim as any composer to be the Shakespeare of music, yet a
There’s a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie in which Tippi Hedren is emptying a safe while a cleaning lady silently drags her mop towards her. Can Hedren, playing the disturbed Marnie, slip down the stairs before the woman turns her head? I felt a twinge of the same panic last week interviewing the composer Nico
In Dan Brown’s new thriller, Origin, we are introduced to the Catholic church’s sinister far-right rival — a paranoid worldwide cult dedicated to undermining the reforms of Pope Francis. This toxic outfit has its own pope, who runs it from his ‘Vatican’ at El Palmar de Troya, on the Andalusian plain; hence its name, the
If two concert pianists are performing a work written for two grand pianos, there are two ways you can position the instruments. They can sit side by side, an arrangement known as ‘twin beds’. Or they can be slotted together so the performers face each other. That’s called a ‘69’. When Martha Argerich and Stephen
Our guest on today’s Holy Smoke podcast is A.N. Wilson, author of a hugely admired biography of Queen Victoria and – as you’ll hear – the most mischievous intellectual in the land. Cristina Odone and I started out by asking about Victoria’s vigorous (and possibly whisky-fuelled) persecution of Anglo-Catholics in the Church of England: the
You must listen to the feisty new episode of the Holy Smoke podcast, in which Cristina Odone and I ask our guest Jeremy Vine whether, if he were alive in the 21st century, Jesus would have been on Twitter. If so, what would happen to him? Jeremy – whose new book What I Learnt discusses
English country churches: everyone loves them, no one wants to actually pray in them. ‘People have a massive sentimental attachment to the buildings, but they don’t actually come to services,’ says my guest on this week’s Holy Smoke podcast, the Rev Ravi Holy. He’s a country vicar in Wye, Kent, where he regularly attracts 150 worshippers
Sir James MacMillan’s European Requiem, performed at the Proms on Sunday, isn’t about Brexit. The composer had to make this clear in a Radio 3 interview just before the broadcast, because the BBC was just itching to cast the work — a melancholy score, despite its thunderous drumbeats — as a lament for us leaving
Today’s Holy Smoke podcast responds to rumours that the Government is planning to betray parents who want to send their children to faith schools. As The Sunday Times reported: Ministers are expected to drop plans to allow Christian, Jewish and Muslim state schools to admit all their pupils from one faith after warnings that the move could heighten
When you first encounter it, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis can sound like the Ninth Symphony with more singing but no tunes. But the more I listen to it, the more I agree with the composer that it’s his greatest work — or, at least, up there with the last two piano sonatas and his String Quartet
At the end of June, Pope Francis dismissed Cardinal Gerhard Müller from his position as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) – arguably the most important position in the Catholic Church after that of the Pope himself, since the CDF is in charge of doctrine. Müller was given no notice that the Pope was breaking from
Cardinal George Pell, the head of the Vatican’s finances, has been charged with historic sex offences in his native Australia. He is returning there ‘to clear his name’. ‘I look forward to my day in court’, he said at a press conference in Rome this morning. If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t be looking
Forgive the inflammatory headline, but that’s the conclusion that millions of Britons have drawn from media descriptions of the DUP. Mainland commentators seem unable to make any distinction between the Democratic Unionist Party, founded by the late Ian Paisley, and his small Free Presbyterian sect, which is indeed influenced by American fundamentalism. We know the
Is Evgeny Kissin, born in Moscow in 1971, the most famous concert pianist in the world? Probably not, if you stretch the definition of ‘concert pianist’ to encompass the circus antics of Lang Lang, the 34-year-old Chinese virtuoso who — in the words of a lesser-known but outstandingly gifted colleague — ‘can play well but
There’s a mischievous, not to say malicious, Twitter photograph of Theresa May circulating this morning. It shows her sporting shoulder pads and severely slicked-backed boyish hair, campaigning in the 1987 general election. On top of it someone has added the words: ‘Curbing the promotion of lesbianism in Merton’s schools starts with girls having male role
Harpsichordists are supposed to make love, not war: Sir Thomas Beecham famously compared the sound they make to ‘two skeletons copulating on a tin roof’. But now two masters of the instrument, the Iranian-American Mahan Esfahani and the German Andreas Staier, are locked in mortal combat. For connoisseurs of finely tuned insults, it’s riveting stuff.
Pope Francis met President Trump this morning and they appear to have hit it off. After a 30-minute meeting in the Vatican, the president emerged beaming, describing the private audience as ‘the honour of a lifetime’. The Pope, too, was described as ‘grinning from ear to ear’. We don’t know if the two men discussed
Just 30 per cent of Britons feel that their religion or faith is important to them, according to the 2017 Ipsos MORI survey of global trends. That puts us at the bottom of the international table: only Swedes (29 per cent), Belgians (27 per cent) and the Japanese (22 per cent) are more secular than we are, according to
Just before Peter Donohoe played the last of Alexander Scriabin’s ten piano sonatas at the Guildhall’s Milton Court on Sunday, the autograph score of the piece was beamed on to the wall behind him. It was just a glimpse —- but enough to show us that Scriabin had the most beautiful musical calligraphy of any
