A few miscellaneous items worth a look.

At Crooked Timber, one on Christopher Hitchens. This includes Jimmy Doyle giving some quotations from the Guardian and the New Statesman from the autumn of 2001 to show sceptics that there really were people saying just the kind of thing that other people on the thread had said no one other than ol’ Ward Churchill actually said. Quite amusing, in a morbid way. And one
on literary theory and whether literary criticism that is interested in, say, formal or aesthetic aspects of literature, or uses the dread word ‘imagination,’ is automatically ‘conservative’ and if so in what sense and according to whom and why should we care and who asked you anyway. … Read the rest

I’m going to have to disagree with my friend Norm on Polly Toynbee’s comment on the pope. I hate to do it – but he’s off on his travels, so that’s all right. David Hadley of Stuff and Nonsense alerted me to Norm’s post. (How busy I am these days. I don’t even have time to get around to checking Norm every day. Terrible.)

I really don’t get it. Every time there’s an event that brings forth a manifestation of religious belief by large numbers of people, some militant secularist or other will give out an opinion that would be jejune coming from an intelligent sixth-former…But how she can speak in so trivializing a way of world-wide reaction to

I usually like David Aaronovitch’s columns (even though, or perhaps because, they sometimes make me squirm slightly – not enough to rattle the chair, but enough to rearrange a few dust particles), but I take issue with something in this one. It’s about the pope and the ructions last week, and what to make of it.

The cover of last week’s New Statesman, for example, proclaims of the dead Pope that ‘he did more to spread Aids in Africa than prostitution and the trucking industry combined’. By opposing the use of condoms, the argument went, the church had created intense and unnecessary suffering.
But this won’t do, either. The church has only succeeded in Africa by tolerating polygamy, and,