When Don Shula died earlier this month at the glorious age of 90, the legendary head coach of the Miami Dolphins was the subject of moving tributes from virtually every figure of consequence in the world of professional American football. Players, coaches and fans reminded us that (to employ St Augustine’s famous phrase in a

The isolated, gloomy Pontiff is a sympathetic figure - and I have an extra reason to be grateful to him

I have no doubt that Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini currenly enjoys the beatific vision for the very simple reason that I have obtained a humble but undeniable miracle by his intercession. Two weeks before our son, John, was born, my wife came down with a serious parasitic infection. After a day of perilously

In one of those gorgeous verbal doodles with which he filled the pages of his absorbing (and at the time quite illegal) wartime journal, Hugh Trevor-Roper tells us that he likes Listening to solemn music, the stately and serene music of Handel; and walking, in May, through woods planted by 18th century dukes; and drinking

Including an Irish saint who loved birds, and the unfortunately-named St Arian

Including a great English martyr and a monk famed for his icon painting

Including the Florentine nobleman who led a life of uninterrupted charity

Including the king who relinquished his throne and the martyr who threw herself onto a fire

Including the saint who travelled on the back of a sea monster, and a weaver who was forced to become a bishop

Of all the folks who could end up in the headlines in the Year of Our Lord MMXVII, our first parents seem unlikely, if highly deserving, candidates for their poor banished children’s attention. Adam and Eve have been in the news thanks to a ludicrous book by Stephen Greenblatt, an American professor who long ago

‘Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory,” says the baron to his son in Disraeli’s Contarini Fleming. I wonder whether he would have approved of biographies of historians. There are not nearly enough of these amusing books, many of which have given me more pleasure than shelves of novels. I

There are plenty of things for which I thank God: good friends, the health of my children, the glorious tenth anniversary of Summorum Pontificum, the fact that the Detroit Tigers will not be trading their star pitcher Justin Verlander. Another is the fact that my wife and I were never made to attend a Catholic