It’s early afternoon on Friday 16 October 2026. I enter the public transport office in central Strasbourg, next to the Alt Winmärik tram stop. Alt Winmärik means Old Wine Market in the old Germanic Alsace dialect. From the 14th century onwards, this street was the place wine was bought and sold. A genial, middle-aged man asks me how he can help. ‘I’ve just paid one of your machines for a 10-trip book of electronic tickets to be added to my travel card,’ I say. ‘See, here’s my

• California, December 1976. A new album by the Eagles satirises the shallow materialism of mid-70s Los Angeles, portraying it with dry humour as Hotel California. In the title song, a traveller on a dark desert highway stops at a hotel that looks inviting, but soon finds himself trapped in a nightmare as inescapable as it is seductive. An unnamed woman stands in the doorway, welcoming guests. ‘Her mind is Tiffany-twisted’, sings Don Henley. In other words, warped by an insat

During the 2018 Centennial of World War I, Donald Trump was scheduled to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France. The relentless rain made helicopter travel to the Cemetery impossible, but aides informed the President he could be driven instead. Trump’s response, according to accounts from a senior Defence Department official, was that he didn’t want to visit the Cemetery, as it was ‘filled with losers’. On the same trip, Trump reportedly said the 1,800 US marines k

In the late 1960s a young English composer, John Tavener, released some cantatas on the Beatles’ Apple record label. In 1977, in his early 30s, Tavener converted to Orthodox Christianity. He started attending St Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral in London’s Bayswater, and embarked on studies of the early Church Fathers. The iconography, theology and ancient liturgies of the Orthodox Church became a dominant influence on Tavener. A little over a decade later, his work The Prot

Social media has been in meltdown in recent days about graffiti allegedly defacing the hallowed walls and pillars of Canterbury Cathedral. The graffiti in the Cathedral has been seen as symptomatic of a range of ills – from the death of the Church of England to the final demise of Western Culture. Some have called for Anglican clergy to be 'strung up' for this blasphemous outrage. JD Vance and Elon Musk piled in, condemning the cathedral graffiti as ugly and disrespectful. If

It was in the mid-1990s that I discovered I was the Antichrist. The insight into my true identity came in a letter from a Mrs McPherson, who lived on the Isle of Man. She’d read a book I’d written on fashion and style, and was offended that a Christian writer (a minister no less) could write a book on a topic as worldly as bodily adornment. Mrs McPherson didn’t hold back. She described my book as: ‘a monstrous, blasphemous lie’ and ‘a wilful transgression of God’s word’. She