Queen Camilla

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Should I be a Jew, Muslim or Hindu? 

Time is running out. We all have to meet our maker at some point, and although I’m fit as a fiddle I like to plan ahead. God has many brands and many names and I want to show up at the right shrine and to use the correct form of address. Technically, I don’t believe in a creator, because my rational mind accepts the agnostic theory. Existence is an attribute of entities that are bound by time and space. God is unbound by time and space, therefore existence is not among his attributes. QED. And yet something in me rejects this logic and yearns to believe – just in case.

Wednesday

Rachel Johnson

I embarrassed myself at Jilly Cooper’s memorial

I am ‘sharing’ what follows as a public service. Also, as self-care in the hope that publicly shaming myself might stop me from doing it again. What can she be on about, you must be thinking, this time? My name is Rachel Johnson, and I have a chronic inability to leave the house on time, even for something I have been looking forward to for months. One example: heli-skiing in Italy with my son Oliver. All I had to do was catch a flight to Geneva whence we would be conveyed to a divine off-grid chalet via car and driver, then snowmobile. I had one job. To get us to

Thursday

Gyles Brandreth

How the Queen is spreading the joy of reading

Queen Camilla loves a book. Almost any book will do. ‘There’s something so tactile about a book,’ she says. ‘I like the smell of the pages when you open the cover. I like turning the pages and folding down a corner ready for next time…’ The Queen, 78, has loved books for as long as she can remember. She says her father, Bruce Shand, inspired this lifelong passion: ‘He read to us as children. He chose the books, and we listened. He was probably the best-read man I’ve come across anywhere. He devoured books.’ Bruce Shand was a soldier. His father was a writer, about architecture, food and wine. His

Wednesday

Damian Thompson

The coronation music was – mostly – a triumph

Sir Hubert Parry was upgraded from knight bachelor to baronet by King Edward VII in 1902, and my goodness he earned it. His anthem for Edward’s coronation, I was Glad when they Said Unto Me, begins with a thrilling brass fanfare – or it has done since George V’s coronation in 1911: Parry’s original introit wasn’t sufficiently attention-grabbing, so he beefed it up. But the most spine-tingling moment has been there from the beginning. ‘I was…’ sings the choir on the tonic chord of B flat major – and then the word ‘glad’ bursts out where we aren’t expecting it, in G major. The Abbey staged a musical banquet in