Michael Blackburn; ‘What to do with something like Notre Dame has ramifications beyond the physical. A culture is more than its buildings, which can be preserved in some manner even if they are drastically altered. What also needs preservation and nourishing are all the other living parts – the arts and sciences, the language, the institutions, the appreciation of the land, its birds, beasts and flowers, and so on.’

By MICHAEL BLACKBURN. NOBODY SHOULD BE surprised that malevolence can be found in the hearts of humans wherever they live, even New Zealand. The massacre at the mosques in Christchurch was not surprising because it happened, given the febrile nature of the world, but because of where it happened. I don’t want to be rude […]

Michael Blackburn: ‘And so we come back to the beginning: somebody says something you don’t like, you push the outrage button, release the predigested script and hope the collective flood washes it all away. You’ll do anything to avoid the lonely process of having to think for yourself. That would be too hard, wouldn’t it? Worse, you might find you’re not as virtuous as you think you are.’

Michael Blackburn: ‘the one clear, incontrovertible truth the Brexit business has demonstrated to us in our knuckle-dragging oikiness is the blistering ineptitude of our politicians.’

By MICHAEL BLACKBURN. THE ONLY TIME I heard the late Christopher Hitchens thrown off balance in a discussion was when he was discussing Trotsky with Matthew Parris and Robert Service. Hitchens had put forward Trotsky as his choice for the “Great Lives” series on Radio 4 (2006), hosted by ex-Tory MP, Matthew Parris. Robert Service’s […]

Michael Blackburn: ‘I don’t know what he or my grandmother would have thought about the EU. They died before Britain joined the Common Market as it was then called. I suspect they may have been ambivalent at best. My grandmother despised the French (“let us down in both world wars,” I recall her saying) and there was little love among most Brits of their age, and my father’s, for the Germans. They had reasons for their hatreds. ‘

Michael Blackburn: ‘We are slipping back into the old days when we were mere consumers of whatever the media put in front of us, except that as we are given less and less input of our own, those opposing us are given more. There is still hope that freedom of speech will survive the coming suppression. ‘

Michael Blackburn: ‘It’s no wonder so many young people leave school semi-literate and semi-numerate. How can you teach literature, for example, when you have to present pupils with fragments of a book only, and are actively discouraged from getting them to read the whole book? (I have two examples of this told to me recently.) ‘