Posts by Office

    Historian and Sunday Times columnist Niall Ferguson is pretty up front about his atheism.  A ‘hard-shelled materialist’ is how he describes himself, citing Darwin, Newton and Adam Smith…

  The Victorian Christmas popularised by Charles Dickens may be a cliché, but it’s a seductive one. For those who like to indulge, the film The Man Who Invented Christmas…

  An old-fashioned theology professor of mine once suggested that reading cheap detective novels is a sign of moral decay. When the parson is addicted to ‘whodunnits’, it’s evidence that…

    500 light years away, in the constellation of Cygnus, orbiting a dwarf star, lies the planet Kepler-186f. It’s too small to be seen by even the most powerful…

    ‘In the beginning were created only the germs or causes of the forms of life, which were afterwards to be developed in gradual course.’ So runs one account…

    When Martin Gardner came out as a believer in God, fans and colleagues were shocked. Author of more than a hundred books on maths and science, Gardner’s monthly…

    When the economist John Maynard Keynes purchased old boxes of Isaac Newton’s unpublished papers at auction in 1936, he didn’t know what he’d find. For over two centuries,…

    Push through the tourists in the Roman piazza, dodge the chaotic traffic, and duck inside the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, and there, in the Cornaro Chapel,…

  In his 1848 novel Yeast, socialist campaigner and Anglican priest Charles Kingsley launched a stinging attack on established leaders in the Church of England, for their obsession with irrelevant…

  In 1942, a small passenger boat called the Struma was torpedoed by submarine off the coast of Turkey. On board were almost eight hundred European Jews, including one hundred…