Why the fairies disappeared

It’s a long time since I took mushrooms, but my recollection is that the experience is profoundly reality-warping. Assumptions dissolve; mundane details or textures are suddenly fascinating; the wider world no longer echoes back your habitual understanding of it, but …

How to rewild Christianity

There is much talk these days of Christianity being doomed: of churches closing, values fading, and community feeling ebbing. But was there ever a time when Christian Britain was one big, cuddly Richard Curtis film?

The New Atheism of the …

Putin’s holy war on Ukraine

As the world watched the Wagner mercenaries make good on their mutinous threats and advance on Moscow last month, Vladimir Putin shot them down in a television address. Spitting with rage and refusing to utter Prigozhin’s name, he said that …

One hundred years of platitudes

The worst sort of books make you feel clever without actually making you more so. They flatter your intelligence, encouraging you to nod along in smug agreement at some faux deep observation, giving you a sense of achievement without having …