Category: Articles & Essays

God’s artillery opens fire

Articles & Essays

It’s hard to resist the pull of military metaphors when talking about the recent battles between religion and the so called new-atheists: Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchins, Sam Harris et al. Fighting talk is only natural when combatants on both sides have often been vicious in their attacks. And like the western front in World War I, for all the blasts and flashes, neither side ever manages to advance its trenches. Yet in the very definition of madness, both forces persist in trying the same tactics that have never worked before as though they might suddenly prove efficacious….

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We want it all. And we want it now.

Articles & Essays, Food

Seventy-five years ago, the tinkling of a spoon in a cup signalled the dawn of a new cultural epoch. After seven years of research at a laboratory in Switzerland, the scientist Max Morgenthaler had perfected the technique of spray-drying liquid coffee into a soluble powder. And so on 1 April 1938, the world’s first instant coffee, Nescafé, was launched and from then on instantaneity came to permeate almost every aspect of our lives…

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The unwinnable God argument

Articles & Essays

The most vocal atheists and the believers who take their bait appear ever more like a long-married couple who prefer the familiarity of their dysfunctional relationship to the emptiness that lies beyond an amicable divorce. They trade the same old niggles and complaints with no hope or expectation of mutual understanding.

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On traditional foodstuffs and techniques

Articles & Essays, Food

When no corner of the world has been left unexplored, and imports come with the stigma of food miles, native rare breeds and heritage fruit and vegetables have become the new exotica. But, as broadcaster and greengrocer Charlie Hicks puts it, since “there’s often a very good reason they stopped growing them in the first place” is there anything more to this new-found love of the old than nostalgia, novelty and scarcity value?

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Bibliocide

Articles & Essays, Videos

No civilised person is supposed to make bonfires of books. ‘Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings,’ wrote the German poet Heinrich Heine in the century before Nazism. Burning books is a sacrilegious act, and the taboo against it particularly binds writers. So what was I doing in a Somerset field lighting a match under the 32 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica?

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