Robert Saunders

Guilty confession - I've not yet read the Cicero trilogy, though everyone tells me they're great! I thought Munich was superb - genuinely one of the best takes on Chamberlain out there - and really enjoyed both Conclave and Act of Oblivion. (Less keen on Ghost & Second Sleep, but even Homer nods).

Robert Harris is an interesting example of a novelist who is not religious, but makes a conscious imaginative effort to think himself into belief systems that he doesn't share - particularly in "Conclave" and "Act of Oblivion".

I agree - but the level of religious-cultural literacy required to make sense of that is in vertiginous decline. So studying those subjects will increasingly require an active commitment to learn and study that religious culture (as it would if I were to study Islamic history or Chinese history).

I don't think they're analogous. International students already pay much higher fees, which are used to subsidise UK students. Tourists are not paying four times the local rate to subsidise UK visitors. So one is an additional tax that disrupts an existing redistributive mechanism; the other is not.

Yes, this is a big problem for historical writing today: fewer & fewer students have much awareness of or sensitivity to the central cultural system of the periods they study. It's not a conscious bias, more what Weber called being "religious unmusical": they can't hear/recognise the tunes playing.

Though it's hard to know what "the ethics" of Christianity are if you've never encountered the stories, practices and teachings - what Attlee would call "the mumbo-jumbo" - that transmit them. A religious ethic can certainly outlast religious belief, but it probably can't do so indefinitely.

I'm not sure the link is quite that direct - the Church of England had supported the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the 1950s - but there's certainly a broader shift in how sex is thought about & the frames through which it should be debated, which probably is linked to de-Christianisation.

What's changed, I'd suggest, is the reach of Christian culture beyond active believers. Thatcher could talk about the parables in speeches & assume her audience would get the reference. Neither Churchill, Attlee nor Benn were conventionally religious, but all were strongly influenced by Christianity

Two theses on this:

1.Historians cut religion out of political history too early. Well into the 80s, UK politics is still saturated in the stories, referents & norms of Christianity (irrespective of belief).

2.The collapse of that common culture is the most neglected factor in more recent politics

Conservatives in the 20th century often insisted that they were not "political" at all - that "politics" was something that socialists and liberals did, while Toryism was simply an apolitical "commonsense". I wonder if there's a touch of that going on here.

It's unfathomable.

I wonder if something has been cut after "It is hard to imagine that taking place in Britain"? Perhaps he intended to suggest some more British form of "vigour". But as it stands, the article calls for the vigour of the US and gives terrorising parents as an example. It's a deplorable passage.

"Second, we need to enforce the policy with a vigour that has reduced flows at America’s southern borders by 90 per cent, and in Denmark by 95 per cent. Crucial to the Trump programme is an aggressive policy of removals, including snatching suspected illegals off the street. One friend tells me Latino parents are now so afraid to be seen out and about that the other parents have a rota to walk the Latino children to and from school. It is hard to imagine that taking place in Britain."

Just a jaw-dropping paragraph in Trevor Phillips's column for The Times.

This is a policy that, by his own account, has left parents of a particular race too frightened to walk their children to school.

And that's the example he chooses of the "vigour" we "need".
www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

When did you grow the beard?

mr. potato head is packing you an extra pair of shoes and your angry eyes just in case ALT: mr. potato head is packing you an extra pair of shoes and your angry eyes just in case

The problem before Brexit wasn't too much "sensible face politics"; it was politicians putting in their angry eyes and endorsing populist policies in which they did not believe.

Oddly, they then found it hard to persuade people to vote against them.

It's not that long ago that the Liberal Democrats staged a walk out of Parliament, in protest at the lack of an in/out referendum on EU membership.

Our politics would be a lot healthier if more politicians actually made the case to the public for the things they believed in.

mr. potato head is packing you an extra pair of shoes and your angry eyes just in case ALT: mr. potato head is packing you an extra pair of shoes and your angry eyes just in case

The problem before Brexit wasn't too much "sensible face politics"; it was politicians putting in their angry eyes and endorsing populist policies in which they did not believe.

Oddly, they then found it hard to persuade people to vote against them.

He doesn't seem to be commenting on Polanski's popularity: he's challenging the workability of his proposed policy. In an age that's dominated by the question "how does this poll?", I'm quite reassured that some still ask "how will this work?" (We can then debate whether or not he's right).

The fact that in both 2019 and 2024, the winning party did so with a set of manifesto promises that could not be kept and dissolved upon contact with actual office is something that as an industry we should be much more bothered by than we are.

the entirety of human history has actually been manipulation by cats to get them to every corner of earth.

Gabrielle Giffords • @GabbyGiffords • 3h X My husband @CaptMarkKelly is a 25-year Navy combat pilot veteran. He served our country with strength, courage, and integrity, dedicating his career to protecting us and upholding our constitution. Today, the President of the United States called him a traitor and demanded he be Show more Captain Mark Kelly @CaptMarkK...• 3h I've had a missile blow up next to my airplane, been shot at dozens of times by anti-aircraft fire, and launched into orbit — all for my country. I never thought l'd see a President call for my execution.... • 3.7K {7 2.3K 8.9K thl 461K 企 Janette Fenway @LeesLemmas • 43m @elonmusk Why is my feed suddenly flooded with lefty lawmakers spouting nonsense? 276 • 69 贝 Elon Musk * X @elonmusk X.com Because we are failing very badly with the recommendations algorithm. Doing my best to address this. 3:49 PM • 11/20/25 • 6.3K Views

An X user asks Elon Musk why they’re seeing tweets from left-wing lawmakers.

Musk: “Because we are failing very badly with the recommendations algorithm. Doing my best to address this.”

The plan says that "A dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO, mediated by the United States." This implies that both Russia and the Trump administration don't see the US as part of NATO in any real sense. That should deeply alarm every other NATO state.

I don't think that is the lesson of the 2016 referendum. The lesson there is that if you never make the argument for something, but just constantly give ground, and then run a fear-based campaign that says "we'd love to do this too, but your pet will die", you're likely to lose.

Michael Gove on claims of a bad culture in No. 10 during the pandemic:

"The business of govt can't be carried on in the manner of a Jane Austen novel".

As so often, this assumes that the macho, hyper-aggressive style of Cummings & co produces better decisions. All the evidence suggests the reverse

A theme of the Hallett report is that decisionmakers routinely underestimated the ability of the public to deal with complexity & accept hard trade-offs.

It's a problem that continues to plague our politics. One lesson of the pandemic is surely that we can have more honest conversations with voters

Universities are bound by quite a tight legal framework on who they can and can't exclude. "Tommy Robinson" has a record of unlawful speech, which is one of the grounds on which a speaker can be denied Universities cannot bar a speaker on the grounds of lawful speech or opinions.

This could be a nice end-of-term treat for your students.

It was a big audience - the Sheldonian was almost full - but it was heavily male. (In the sections opposite & below me I counted around 80% men, of all ages). The reaction was hard to gauge, but there was little sign of rapture. I suspect a lot, like me, had come out of curiosity rather than support

As far as I can see, no public explanation has been given for the shift - and that form of words comes up a lot. To me, that suggests a reason that someone wants kept private. I wonder if the Scruton family were uneasy about some of those invited, but that's just me speculating.

He wouldn't necessarily see them as acolytes. It's a very Silicon Valley model: there's a board that appoints a CEO from its number. For Yarvin, one of the follies of democracy is that it lets the shareholders pick the CEO in a one-person-one-vote election.