'As a Christian, I joyfully agreed to provide my contribution to develop such a moving and crucial story for the big screen,' Andrea Bocelli said

There has never been much that China has wanted from the outside world. Exotic produce from Southeast Asian rainforests used to be of interest; now it’s luxury goods from London and Paris, plus entire vineyards in Bordeaux. Foreign ideas, too, have rarely interested China. It took millennia to develop the blend of Confucianism and Taoism

Typo was originally a short form of typographer – that is, a printer. Its first known use is 1816, but by the end of the century it had come to have its present-day meaning: a typographical error. Of course it leaves open the question of whether an error is inadvertent or deliberate. I choose this

Seventy-five, 1945, 1418 … To understand the concept of the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ one needs to know the meaning of these numbers. The cathedral, an imposing edifice in the town of Odintsovo near Moscow, was consecrated in June by Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church and is now the official church

It is a treasured place for fiction lovers: the house in the village of Chawton, Hampshire, where Jane Austen lived for the last eight years of her life, from 1809 to 1817, and wrote some of her best-known novels. But last month the house, now a museum, was threatened with permanent closure due to the

That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation By David Bentley Hart Yale University Press, 222pp, £20/$26 Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart denies that hell is everlasting. He does not merely claim that we have grounds for hope for the salvation of all. Nor does he hold that the unsaved will be

I was a single mum in Rome during the heyday of The West Wing, so I come to this a couple of decades and a few elections short, but my quarantine catch-up came as a shock. One of the smartest examples of TV writing I have ever seen, The West Wing has a captivating cast

Perry Mason HBO/Sky Atlantic Like most shows produced by HBO, Perry Mason wants to be taken seriously as prestige drama, not mere TV. So in the early minutes of the first episode, we hear characters gratuitously using the f-word and view a dead baby with its eyelids sewn open (a sight not made any less

Giuseppe Ungaretti admired Catholicism, but went in a very different direction

The prominent Black Lives Matter activist, Shaun King, this week argued that depictions of a “white Jesus” should be taken down because they are a “gross form of white supremacy.” “I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down,” the 40-year-old tweeted, adding that the call extended to

After Life Netflix It was hard not to feel some admiration for Ricky Gervais’s speech at the Golden Globes this year, when he took Hollywood celebrities to task for rank hypocrisy. On the woke posturing of the same A-Listers who work for ethically dubious corporations, Gervais commented: “If ISIS started a streaming service, you’d call

Beethoven’s symphonies have come to be seen as the pinnacle of artistic achievement in music. The distinguished art historian Alessandra Comini described Beethoven’s music as having “revelatory dimensions”. The composer himself described his work as a divine art, and he regarded his symphonies as not merely products of high craftsmanship, but expressions of a moral