Catholicism

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is greeted by Pope Francis during the Ordinary Public Consistory at St. Peter's Basilica in February (Photo: Franco Origlia/Getty)

Benedict XVI leaves Rome to deliver a coded message to his supporters

11 July 2015 9:00 am

Quietly, discreetly, the Pope Emeritus is offering a different vision to that of Pope Francis

Boccaccio and Petrach

The constant inconstancy that made Italians yearn for fascism

11 July 2015 9:00 am

Jan Morris on the inconsistency and paradox that has characterised Italian thought over the centuries — and the desperate search for certainty

2067: the end of British Christianity

13 June 2015 9:00 am

England’s churches are in deep trouble

Anita Dobson as Queen Elizabeth I in ‘Armada: 12 Days to Save England’

BBC2's Armada has something for everybody - including three yummy female historians

30 May 2015 9:00 am

It has been a while since the BBC really pushed the boat out on the epic history documentary front. Perhaps…

Social comedy Peruvian-style

25 April 2015 9:00 am

Mario Vargas Llosa likes to counterpoint his darker novels with rosier themes: after the savagery of The Green House came…

Why Pope Francis could be facing a Catholic schism

11 April 2015 9:00 am

It’s not just Vatican infighting any more. Pope Francis has a potential schism on his hands

Why wasn’t there more about the other faiths over Easter on the BBC?

11 April 2015 9:00 am

There was no shortage of Easter music and talks across the BBC networks with a sunrise service on Radio 4…

What happened to Julie Burchill on silent retreat

4 April 2015 9:00 am

What I discovered on a silent retreat

The Babies Castle, a branch of Dr Barnardo’s at Hawkhurst, Kent in 1934

Love child or bastard: the lottery of being born on the wrong side of the blanket

21 March 2015 9:00 am

My father was handed over a shop counter when he was a day old. His aunt had tried to pass…

The really shocking thing about Michel Houllebecq’s Soumission — he rather likes Islam

17 January 2015 9:00 am

News of Michel Houllebecq’s Soumission caused such a stir that the book was pirated online before publication. David Sexton reports on the latest literary event in France

Rugger, Robin Hood and Rupert of the Rhine: enthusiasms of the young Antonia Fraser

10 January 2015 9:00 am

Despite it being a well known fact that Antonia Fraser had earthly parents, I had always imagined that she had…

‘The Census at Bethlehem’, 1566, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Climate change, Bruegel-style

13 December 2014 9:00 am

The world depicted by the Flemish master is not so different from our own, says Martin Gayford

The erotic Mary, left, by Gregor Erhart (c.1515–20) and the penitent Mary, right, by El Greco (c.1577)

No one in the Bible has been as elaborately misrepresented as Mary Magdalene

22 November 2014 9:00 am

A bogus history book and a new oratorio turn Mary Magdalene into the wife of Jesus and a human rights activist. Damian Thompson feels sorry for the poor woman

Catherine Parr, whose dangerously reformist ‘Lamentation’ Shardlake must recover, comes over as a sympathetic and attractive figure

The Tudor sleuth who's cracked the secret of suspense

1 November 2014 9:00 am

Some reviewers are slick and quick. Rapid readers, they remember everything, take no notes, quote at will. I’m the plodding…

Charles Scott Moncrieff (left) had a deep personal affinity with Proust (right). His rendering of 'À La Recherche du Temps Perdu' is considered one of the greatest literary translations of all time

Soldier, poet, lover, spy: just the man to translate Proust

16 August 2014 9:00 am

Sam Leith is astonished by how much the multi-talented Charles Scott Moncrieff achieved in his short lifetime

Fleet Street’s ‘wild Irish girl’

22 March 2014 9:00 am

In her early days on Fleet Street, Mary Kenny, as she herself admits, was cast as ‘the wild Irish girl’,…

William Vaux, 3rd Baron Vaux of Harrowden, was tried in the Star Chamber in 1581 with his brother-in-law Sir Thomas Tresham for harbouring Edmund Campion and sentenced to imprisonment in the Fleet with a fine of £1,000

Lords, spies and traitors in Elizabeth's England

8 March 2014 9:00 am

There are still some sizeable holes in early modern English history and one of them is what we know —…

Stirring the imagination into overdrive: ‘The Sinner’ by John Collier (1904)

Sex, secrets, and self-mortification: the dark side of the confessional

1 March 2014 9:00 am

I have a confession to make. I really enjoyed this book. It’s been a while since I admitted something of…

Forgive me, Father

8 February 2014 9:00 am

What Catholics really talk about in the confession box

The great Ascension Day pageant of the Doge performing the marriage of the sea — already a tourist attraction in 17th-century Venice.

What Englishmen learnt from Europe

1 February 2014 9:00 am

A tour of the Continent was a prerequisite for young Jacobean noblemen training for statesmanship — provided they resisted its corrupting influence, says Blair Worden

The one man who makes me hope for peace in Syria

18 January 2014 9:00 am

As Syria’s second peace conference looms, and we prepare ourselves for a lot of hot air drifting over from Geneva,…

Dot Wordsworth: We've been self-whipping since 1672

7 September 2013 9:00 am

Isabel Hardman of this parish explained after last week’s government defeat that a deluded theory among the party leadership had…

Why G.K. Chesterton shouldn’t be made a saint

24 August 2013 9:00 am

G.K. Chesterton was a great journalist, not an angel

The Breath of Night, by Michael Arditti

27 July 2013 9:00 am

There is always meat in Michael Arditti’s novels. He is a writer who presents moral problems via fiction but is…

God Squad

The new God squad: what Archbishop Welby and Pope Francis have in common

6 July 2013 9:00 am

Evangelicals have taken charge in the Vatican and Lambeth Palace