Common Decency

T he new Amazon Prime blockbuster, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which will cost in the region of $200 million dollars per season, making it the most expensive television series ever made, has just begun. Set thousands of years before J.

I didn’t think I would feel this dark and sad. I never met her, I come from a working-class, East London home, and was raised as far from monarchy as it’s possible to be. Yet the death of Queen Elizabeth moved and moves me to the heart and soul.

W hen I was researching my biography of H.G. Wells in the early 1990s what shocked me was the man’s lifelong support for social engineering and eugenics.

T here have been easier times to be Pope. I don’t mean now, with the relatively gentle divisions between conservative and reformer, but during the Second World War, when the irrational became the norm and genocidal madness dominated Europe.

I ’m an orphan. Not literally, as my late parents embraced the daunting task of raising their natural offspring rather well. I’m a political and emotional orphan, a saddened figure wandering in no-man’s land and lamenting the lack of belonging.

I ’ve been an ordained Anglican cleric for three years and conducted numerous ceremonies but never before have I presided over a baptism in the morning, and a funeral in the afternoon.

T he consequences of the United States Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade are still thundering on.

T he Papal visit to Canada was, of course, a very good thing.

F or a column that is essentially about my late father, it might seem slightly odd to begin with a blunt political statement. But here goes.

P olitical conservatism has come a long way. But in the spirit of the word and the ideology, that doesn’t signify progress.