Rod Liddle

There is an interesting debate doing the rounds at the moment: should we allow faith schools in Britain? The debate has been occasioned by our tortuous and interminable wrangling with all things Islamic; it has suddenly occurred to us that allowing children to be inculcated into an ideology which may be antithetical to our national

In the downstairs loo of Richard Dawkins’s house in Oxford there’s a framed award from the Royal Society; to remind visitors, or maybe Richard himself, that here lives a man of some purpose, some gravitas and intellectual clout. The Faraday prize is given to those who communicate science with brilliance and verve to the scientifically

First it was peanuts; now Jesus Christ has been banished from the cabins of British Airways aeroplanes. What will be next to fall victim to the apparently arbitrary scythe of censorship of the BA executives? The airline — which once enraged Margaret Thatcher by replacing the Union flag on the tail fins of its fleet

Rod Liddle says that a society brutalised by violent imagery and the death penalty  has learned to expect such horrors as the bloodbath in the schoolhouse It was what the psychiatric services, with commendable understatement, often call a ‘special’ murder: obscure in its motive, repugnant in its selection of vulnerable and powerless victims, excessively brutal

One of the lovely things about writing for The Spectator is that we have an extremely knowledgeable and well-read audience, so there is no need to explain the sort of stuff that one would need to explain were one writing for the Sun, say, or the New Statesman. An article about humorous verse of the

Rod Liddle says that we should leave teaching to the professionals, however much they annoy us, and stop pretending that children benefit from learning obscure languages or how to paint like Cézanne at home I think it was the bit about Cézanne which really got to me. It came early on in last week’s article.

Rod Liddle finds Stephen Green’s position on homosexuality laughably offensive — but is much more outraged that police officers from a ‘Minority Support Unit’ should arrest him ‘If a man has sexual relations with a man, as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put

There were only two radio reviewers who ever ruffled the feathers of senior management within the BBC. In terms of ratings, the BBC has radio pretty much its own way; neither the competition, which is negligible, nor critical comment is liable to sway a BBC radio mandarin if he firmly believes that (to take an

Why can’t you take biscuits on board at JFK, when computer games are fine at La Guardia? Rod Liddle, in the US, is mystified Aurora, Illinois I’m here to look at a particle accelerator. They’ve got a big one in Aurora, Illinois, all these neutrinos whizzing round and round, wishing they were anywhere but here

There are queues everywhere in Britain, says Rod Liddle. The country has long since reached saturation point and it’s time for the government to admit that we have a problem There were two stories in our morning newspapers this week which seemed at first sight unrelated. The first was a report from the Local Government

We’ve got enough pollution around here already without Harold coming over with his fly open… peeing all over me. Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1965 The words ‘special’ and ‘relationship’ contain within them an endless multiplicity of meaning, all the more so, paradoxically, when they are deployed in combination. You may describe your relationship with another person

Yo — Reader! How are ya doin’? Hot and bothered, I suspect; sticky and irritable. And no less so for having been addressed in such a manner, or for being reminded that this is how the leader of the free world addresses those who do his bidding, the lickspittle minions who bring him gifts of

The Scotch First Minister, Jack McConnell, will doubtless be huddled before a television screen today, dressed in a Portugal football shirt and perhaps munching salted cod, out of respect. An awful lot of his compatriots will be doing the same thing: the Treaty of Windsor, signed with Portugal in 1386, may well be the longest

Sarah Porter may turn out to be Britain’s most prolific serial killer of recent years. Right now, she is behind bars. Porter contracted HIV from a lover and, when she discovered her predicament, set about passing on the virus to as many men as she could, by ‘encouraging’ them to have unprotected sex with her.

Has the David Cameron dog sled recently swung by the little Himalayan city of Thimphu, do you suppose? His latest policy — to make us all, in a rather nebulous way, happier — seems to have been taken word for word from the philosophy of King Jigme Singye Wangchuk, the supreme ruler of Bhutan. Bhutan

Rod Liddle say that — whatever his political failures — the Deputy Prime Minister is the victim of a deplorably hypocritical press assault I spent Bank Holiday Monday trying to find out everything I could about Jo Knowsley, for your benefit. I didn’t find out very much. Certain questions, crucial to the public interest, remain

How should our unelected and unaccountable television and radio presenters and interviewers conduct themselves, so as to avoid the continual allegations of political bias? Last week, in this magazine, Charles Moore had a bit of fun at the expense of Jim Naughtie, the Today programme presenter, for having balked in a rather sententious manner when