Richard Ingrams, Author at Catholic Herald

Richard Ingrams

Richard Ingrams: A pioneer of satirical journalism

March 29, 2018

One day in the London of the 1930s a short, ruddy-faced young man carrying a thick blackthorn staff was to be seen talking earnestly into the mouth of a red pillar box in the street. Passers-by who gathered to see what it was all about could hear him say: “Don’t worry, my little lad, we’ll

Richard Ingrams: Himmler, my father and ‘fake history’

February 22, 2018

It is frustrating to think that I could go to my grave with a number of riddles still unanswered. Is there life on Mars? What happened to Lord Lucan? Why was a book published in 2005 stating that my father, Leonard Ingrams, had assassinated Heinrich Himmler at the end of the war on the order

Richard Ingrams: The Church and the ‘new religions’

February 01, 2018

I was never very good at philosophy, especially its modern version which I had chosen to study at Oxford as part of the two-year “Greats” (classics) degree course. But although I found it hard, sometimes impossible, to follow what clever men such as AJ Ayer were saying, I think I did gain the useful habit,

Abdul was a hero? What humbug

October 19, 2017

I never knew my grandfather, Sir James Reid, who died in 1923, long before I was born. But he was a strong presence in my granny’s house in Aberdeenshire where I was brought up, along with my three brothers, during the war. There were portraits and photographs of him all over the house – a

Richard Ingrams: Don’t stop the music

September 21, 2017

Visiting a music shop in London, I was pleased to see that you can still buy those little white plaster busts of the great composers – Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc – that I remember from my schooldays. They may not be good likenesses but they symbolise the quasi-religious attitude some of us have towards those

Richard Ingrams: Belloc could suffer the fate of Cecil Rhodes

August 10, 2017

The portrait hanging in the debating chamber of the Oxford Union shows a rather grumpy looking old boy seated in an armchair, heavily bearded and clutching an unlit pipe in his right hand. Anyone glancing at it might assume that the old gentleman was a distinguished if long forgotten academic, perhaps a former master of

Richard Ingrams: The Gospels as journalism

April 13, 2017

Hearing the traditional Easter Gospel reading (John 20) always reminds me of Graham Greene’s reaction to it – that it is reportage, a factual account of something that was presumably experienced by the writer. “I remember again in St John’s Gospel,” Greene wrote to his friend, the Spanish priest Fr Leopold Duran, author of the

Holiness is not to be sneered at

December 22, 2016

There is something about a great many saints that annoys and even angers some people. Thus the recent canonisation of Mother Teresa revived in the press the various attacks that had been made on her in her lifetime by the likes of Germaine Greer and, most notably, the late Christopher Hitchens, who went to the

Holiness is not to be sneered at

December 22, 2016

Why do critics spend so much time scolding the saintly?

The Chesterton problem

May 12, 2016

It is a rare issue of the Catholic Herald that doesn’t contain some reference to GK Chesterton, who died 80 years ago but who remains one of our most quoted writers, and not only in the Catholic press. His jokes have lasted better than Oscar Wilde’s – “The only way of catching a train I have discovered

Guilty, but not in the eyes of God

March 24, 2016

I can’t find much to watch on television these days, despite the proliferation of channels– “More means worse”, as Kingsley Amis said about the universities – but I have been gripped these past few weeks by the dramatic reconstruction of the OJ Simpson affair of 1998, which created a worldwide sensation at the time, ending

We can’t even tell the truth about lying

February 11, 2016

It was the Greek historian Plutarch who long ago wrote that we judge famous people not by their great deeds but more often by some small incident or chance remark. Thus in the case of Hillary Clinton, now making her way slowly towards the White House, I am constantly reminded of an occasion in 2008

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