Society

The Pope is visiting Lebanon and Turkey. Will anyone be raising the vexed question of the Latin mass and sacraments with him and asking him exactly why it is so vexed? Though Jesus spoke Aramaic, the New Testament first appeared in Greek in the 1st century ad because that was the common language of the Mediterranean. It remained the language of the liturgy until Pope Damasus I (d. ad 384) invited St Jerome to translate the whole Bible into Latin (the Vulgate: vulgatus, ‘widely used, common’). The Roman empire collapsed in the 5th century ad and local languages started replacing Latin, but the Roman liturgy remained standard in western Europe.

On the Live Aid charity single, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, Bono sings the (somewhat incongruous) line ‘Well tonight, thank God it’s them instead of you’. Although he is referring to starving children dying in poverty rather than well-heeled Americans appearing on television, much the same sentiment applies to the unfortunate ‘special guests’ who have been corralled into the latest (and, presumably, last, unless the ratings pick up dramatically) episode of With Love, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix-funded wallow in self-regard and vanity. This instalment is festive-themed, and comes with all the joyful élan of a drunken department store Santa placing a lump of coal in a child’s stocking.

I am not sure there are numbers small enough to capture the net literary loss to Britain of Sally Rooney’s books no longer being published here. Nonetheless, it seems that the would-be criminal bestselling author is banking on the withdrawal of her books and the television based on them being a huge deal – one major enough to shift Home Office policy in favour of Jew-haters at home and abroad. What a heavenly idea: the most politically odious, witless writer in generations being locked up till I’m almost a pensioner Rooney, a keen supporter of Palestine Action, now a proscribed terror group in the UK since breaking into RAF Brize Norton

Quietly this afternoon, the government’s last remaining hope of achieving net zero by 2050 drained away. BP has abandoned its project to develop a ‘blue’ hydrogen plant on Teesside which was supposed to produce the gas at a rate of 1.2 GW. It is not just a defeat for net zero ambitions but for Ed Miliband personally, given that he had fought hard in cabinet to advance the project while Keir Starmer and business secretary Peter Kyle had favoured using the site for a rival data centre. The data centre is now likely to proceed – an energy-hungry project in place of a green energy one. It is not just

Last year I visited Lincoln for the first time. It’s difficult to resist the elevated beauty and dominant cathedral, but also hard to avoid the plaque inside, full of contrition, explaining the 13th-century blood libel, where local Jews were accused of murdering a child so as to use his blood during their rituals. The result, predictably, was yet another wave of anti-Semitism, and Jews tortured and murdered. Such obscenities would be repeated about Jews throughout mediaeval England until their eventual expulsion in 1290. Yet even after England forcibly removed the Jewish population, the Christian idea of the Jew as an outsider, whose only role in the Biblical story was a

‘Tom Stoppard is dead.’ For anyone who cares for the theatre, the English language, and especially for those of us who knew him, these words are as unthinkable as they are hard to bear. How can such a force of nature, such a generosity of spirit, such a voice of sanity, have fallen silent? And yet he has gone. To the end, his body emaciated by cancer, he was still the old Tom: self-deprecating but full of ideas and plans. He might have one more play inside him, he told me, but his fingers could no longer physically write and dictation somehow stopped the words from flowing. He was cared