Freddy Gray

It seems that everyone agrees Pope Francis should be Time’s ‘Person of the Year 2013’. Better him than Miley Cyrus, at any rate, or Bashar al-Assad, and Francis deserves it, too. This year he has — forgive the media-speak — changed the narrative about Christianity in the liberal world. He’s spreading the Good News, not

What happened to the cheese-eating surrender monkeys? Just over a decade ago, the French, having refused to join the allied adventure in Iraq, were the butt of every hawkish joke. (Remember ‘Freedom fries’? Oh how we laughed.) Now, as America and Britain are beating a retreat from the world stage, France has turned into the

A successful gambler once told me: ‘Never bet on football, never bet on multipliers, and never ever bet on football multipliers.’ Multipliers, in case you don’t know, are those enticing combination wagers on bookmakers’ shopfronts: ‘Liverpool win 2-0 + Sturridge to score = 33/1.’ Mugs like me fall for them every time. My subconscious tends

As Isabel says, the HS2 brigade are on a roll. Not only are Labour now under serious pressure over the party’s support or otherwise for the project, each day brings a new headline about the advantages of high speed rail. Today, the money quote comes from David Prout, the HS2 director general. He says that, without high speed

Hats off to the Second City Network for the brilliant video above. The funny thing about the great Syria intervention saga has been the number of astoundingly smug and normally dovish left-liberal types who have been cheering on a US-led strike. Those who would usually be first to cry ‘western imperialism’ have in this instance

Leave Florence and Sienna to the aesthetes. Let the in-crowd do Naples and Palermo. For the amateur Italophile, Rome is the destination. The eternal city is endlessly glorious, chaotic, stylish and funny: where else do you see nuns listening to iPods? Or medieval churches with condom machines by the doors? You can barely walk ten

Well, well, well. Nick Cohen’s excellent column in this week’s mag  has caused a stir today. Sadly, though, Nick’s astute argument became another excuse for a boring slanging match between atheists and believers. And of course Stephen Fry waded in: Mary had a little lamb It’s fleece was white as snow All you religious dicks

Of all the qualities one hopes for in a Bank of England Governor – a brilliant mind, the courage to tell politicians they are wrong, supernatural foresight – coolness is not among them. I don’t mean coolness under pressure; clearly that helps. I mean the ability to project a hip image. The new Bank of

Here’s another sign that America’s economy is on the mend: US culture wars are in the news again. When Americans are not depressed about unemployment and ‘declinism’, they revert to rowing about liberty. It’s what they do best. But the culture wars are becoming a culture rout. Yesterday was another good day for America’s progressives: the

Porn, porn, porn. One way or another, we all like talking about it. But today’s debate about children and ‘sexually explicit material’ on the internet might be more demeaning than the smut itself. For a start, it’s government manufactured: the coalition knows that nobody ever lost votes by saying they cared about kids. The media