He was truly one of my intellectual heroes; and one of my fondest ambitions would be to one day wield anything like his level of intellect, erudition, wit, or moral courage. So have a drink tonight to celebrate the remarkable life of a man who truly was as uncompromisingly moral as he was devastatingly, crushingly intelligent....   (read more)

• Female medic awarded Military Cross for bravery • Hitch on the Iraq Effect in the Arab Spring • Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library...   (read more)

So I generally take a pretty live-and-let-live attitude toward religious people and clerics. As regards the Pope's current state visit to Britain, my position is probably that he should be allowed to visit Britain like pretty much anyone else...   (read more)

"Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will last for generations." - Yasser Arafat (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, 1994)...   (read more)

You will have read that the inimitable - I might say, as I have said of Orwell, the indispensible - Christopher Hitchens has been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus....   (read more)

With a hat tip to Andrew Sullivan, here are Christopher Hitchens's Ten Commandments Reimagined....   (read more)

I'd forgotten, until reminded late this morning, that today is 7/7 - the fourth anniversary of the London Tube and bus bombings. So today seems a good, if not entirely un-controversial, day to point up the recent report: Sharia Law or 'One law for all'? from the think-tank Civitas...   (read more)

The fact that McCain lost me has now freed me to vote my conscience: to vote Libertarian - the Party of Principle....   (read more)

I'm a Martin Amis fan. There, I said it. Ordinarily, when people ask me who my favourite contemporary novelists are, I usually slip Amis in - but almost always add that "he's a guilty pleasure" or some such similar wiggly qualification....   (read more)

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and (thus) head of the Church of England, gave a speech in which he predicted that the adoption of some parts of sharia (Islamic religious law) within the UK were "inevitable"...   (read more)

On Memorial Day/Remembrance Day 2007 (okay, slightly after), I'd like to take the liberty of introducing you to a couple of guys I think you should probably know at least a little about....   (read more)

One knew, of course, that the whole racket of American evangelism was just that: a heartless con run by the second-string characters from Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale." (You saps keep the faith. We'll just keep the money.)...   (read more)

Shortly after posting my recent piece on the spectacularly and amusingly unsuccessful attacks in London and Glasgow, I realised I'd mislabelled the perpetrators in calling them "losers". Much more apt would have been the lovely, amusing, and oh-so-useful British epithet of "muppets". These guys truly are muppets of the first rank, and they're running a Muppet Jihad....   (read more)

"As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hardwon human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything." - Christopher Hitchens...   (read more)

"Denmark - a small democracy, which resisted Hitler bravely and protected its Jews as well as itself - a country with an open society, a system of confessional pluralism, and a free press, has been subjected to a fantastic, incredible, organized campaign of lies and hatred and violence - which has attacked its freedom, its trade, its citizens, and its embassies...   (read more)

"The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity . . . It was the deep knowledge - and pray God we have not lost it - that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest."...   (read more)

Due to popular demand (well, the two people who made these demands are popular with me), I've implemented a few improvements to the dispatch commenting system:...   (read more)