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1 week ago | 
dailymail.co.uk | Peter Hitchens
Is Easter disappearing? Will it soon go the way of Whitsun, another once-great Christian holiday now ignored, and replaced by a secular bank holiday on a different date? It has been visibly shrinking in my lifetime. Not all that long ago Good Friday was still a day of solemn stillness. Large numbers of people once went to Church for as long as three hours to mark the Crucifixion of Jesus.
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1 week ago | 
thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Mary Rogers |Peter Hitchens |Matthew Walther
I have just failed to preserve a beautiful tree from being felled. Worse, I have become complicit in its destruction. I may never be sure that I did the right thing. I hate the cutting down of trees, even though I know that it is sometimes necessary. Trees are the lovely works of God, still living in every city among the ugly works of man. These large friendly vegetables are not just plants, but stores of goodness, peace and calm. I once tried hugging one and got nothing out of it.
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1 week ago | 
dailymail.co.uk | Peter Hitchens
Can you connect these events? Prince Harry visits Ukraine. Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, Chief of the Defence Staff, is discovered hanging around Peking talking to various figures in the hideous Chinese tyranny. And the last remnant of Britain’s steel industry can only be saved by Parliament. I can. But it is the threat to our surviving blast furnaces in Scunthorpe which is the most important. Strong independent countries have big steel industries.
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1 week ago | 
thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Peter Hitchens |Mary Rogers |Matthew Walther
I’m bad at games. I always have been. My competitive chess career ended in middle school, when I decided that spending a day of Swiss-system combat at a school library in the lugubrious suburbs of Baltimore was not worth it if I wasn’t going to place. My brother was more naturally gifted, as seemed to be the case in most of these sorts of things, but he was young and undisciplined, so he didn’t pursue it much longer than I did.
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2 weeks ago | 
dailymail.co.uk | Peter Hitchens
I'll put this harshly because I must and because it is making me increasingly angry. Lucy Letby is 35 years old. Her former modest life has fallen away into ruins. Her parents are devastated and far from young. She has been in custody since long before she was convicted. I believe she has been heavily medicated for much of that time because she is so distressed. She has been sentenced to a slow death, sinking over many decades into a pale, hopeless misery in a cell.
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3 weeks ago | 
dailymail.co.uk | Peter Hitchens
What would we think if the Fire Brigade stopped putting out fires because it was too busy? I suspect we would be pretty unhappy. But if firemen then started coming round to our homes in big shiny fire engines - while houses and shops burned merrily away just round the corner - to detain us for saying things on the internet, we would be enraged.
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3 weeks ago | 
dailymail.co.uk | Peter Hitchens
Nuclear war is now much likelier than it used to be. I’ll explain why in a moment. And the newborn warmonger Sir Keir Starmer needs to grasp this. Sir Keir, who was a Cold War peacenik in his young days, seriously wants to send what troops we still have to Ukraine, an instant trigger for war with Russia. Moscow will never tolerate Nato forces openly stationed in that country, any more than the US would put up with Chinese troops in Mexico, or we would accept Russian bomber bases in Ireland.
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3 weeks ago | 
thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Matthew Walther |Peter Hitchens |Ross Douthat
Not far from the house where I spent my infancy and early childhood was an abandoned sanatorium. It had been built in the Thirties for tuberculosis patients, and closed in the Eighties on account of asbestos and lead. A decade later it already looked as if it had been empty for a century: ivy up the red-brick walls, trees growing against the foundations, every visible window a black hole with a ring of dental glass.
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1 month ago | 
dailymail.co.uk | Peter Hitchens
There is now a mighty wall of facts and global expert opinion which casts grave doubt on Lucy Letby's guilt. Every aspect of the prosecution has been coolly dismantled. The supposed chart showing her present at all the deaths has been revealed as rubbish. The supposed 'confession' has been shown to be nothing of the kind. The 'spike' in deaths at the Countess of Chester Hospital has been shown to be horribly typical of the NHS.
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1 month ago | 
dailymail.co.uk | Peter Hitchens
How embarrassing to see one of our Trident submarines steal back home, speckled with barnacles, blotched with rust and with several of its costly acoustic tiles missing. She has been away at sea for more than six months, waiting for a replacement to come out of repairs. Does she even still work? Two recent missile tests have flopped badly and publicly. In one, the rocket shot off across the USA, and had to be destroyed. In the other it failed to ignite and tumbled into the waves.
