Humpty Dumpty

Dignified, gracious, composed, Queen Elizabeth the Second leaves us an example of duty done, and done over as long a spell as one can...

It was little Jack Horner who sat in a corner and said ‘What a good boy am I’ He had found a plum in his pie. It made his day. We are...

Dignified, gracious, composed, Queen Elizabeth the Second leaves us an example of duty done, and done over as long a spell as one can...

I must confess. I have lived my life in the shadow of Mercator. His projection makes Greenland as big as Africa. Other countries gained...

‘Forty-one and nothing done’: who’s undergoing a mid-life crisis? Years spent doing my job and all I’ve got to look forward to is my...

Job had his problems, one of them being his talkative friends who knew all the answers. . They came to grief when they mentioned the...

‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,’ wrote D.H. Lawrence in the poem ‘The Hands of God’. He went on: ‘But it...

Never forget. He was not a Christian. Ovid was a story-teller busy about his work when Jesus was walking with his disciples in Galilee....

Fathers can be useful. True, they don’t always say yes. And they can be embarrassing when they try to outdo teenagers. On the whole they...

Long since the day when the letters p,x and z first aspired to prime positions in polite literature we have learned that orthography is...

The State opening of Parliament shows what the UK can do to capture splendour. It has the horses, the coaches, the breastplates, the...

We like to think of ourselves as growing up. This seems to be a wholly welcome process in the arrangement for humans on Planet Earth. We...

Mere Christianity became more than a dream, more than a catechism, more a message of hope when C.S. Lewis took up his pen. Actually the...

When it comes to conflict, leaders need overwhelming force. That is the price of victory. It is not usual to find this tactic offered as...

‘He carried our sins’ (1 Peter 2.24). What could be clearer? We know exactly what it means when we see the family car full of family,...

Eggs don’t bounce, we may say. If only they did! When William Tyndale presented to the English people in 1534 a New Testament in their...

No. It couldn’t be. Paul was a confident performer in public. He knew the right words and chose them carefully. He knew how to get the...

Abraham was a man of perspective. He was not altogether overwhelmed by the proximity of things or their apparent perfection. If he had...

‘Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight’ is the lament at the end of Christopher Marlowe’s play ‘Doctor Faustus’. A...

It was in the 17th century that the word ‘nonconformist’ came into general use. It proved to be a useful term. The 1662 Act of Uniformity...