No-one knows what Vladimir Putin is going to do next on the Ukrainian border – including perhaps Putin himself. Having made such sweeping demands for western concessions, he cannot easily simply back out of the confrontation he has created without…
On a family visit last week, I was taken to the city which a thousand years ago was Europe’s (some say the world’s) largest and most cultured. Not Rome, nor London, nor Paris – but Cordoba, in southern Spain. …
When Henry Vyner-Brooks proposed a double biography about two ‘Fathers of Europe’, his publishers were not convinced it would work. Although they had previously published his Renaissance novels, they balked at his plan to present a ‘set of binoculars with…
Reflections with family and friends on the highs and lows of the past year over the past days were enriched by a story shared in a friend’s Christmas newsletter. After a church service, a young lad was intrigued by the…
The story is irrepressible – despite all efforts to eradicate religion from the ‘winter holiday season’; undeterred by the shrill claims of the ‘New Atheists’ (remember them?) that religion was the root of all evil ; and regardless of the bastardisation of St…
