Features

The Anglican priests charged with exorcising evil spirits

Last month, a trailer for the new Exorcist film – the scariest trailer ever, apparently – was released. The Exorcist: Believer isn’t out until Friday 13 October – just in time for Halloween – but Hollywood movies about demons are legion. This one follows The Pope’s Exorcist (released on Good Friday), in which Russell Crowe

What will Charles III’s reign look like?

The last time a monarch acceded to the throne, her subjects had to wait ten months to hear her speak. Elizabeth II was only 25 and had her whole adult life before her. The public were more patient in those days and the media was an entirely different creature, moving at a slower pace.  It

Ben Lazarus

The godfather of AI: why I left Google

Ten minutes before I meet Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘godfather of AI’, the New York Times announces he’s leaving Google. After decades working on artificial intelligence, Hinton now believes it could wipe out humanity. ‘It is like aliens have landed on our planet and we haven’t quite realised it yet because they speak very good English,’

Will my coronation marching measure up?

Travelling to Ukraine on the President’s train is the most secure route into Kyiv. This is my fourth visit to the country since the invasion. Previously I accompanied Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. This time I am with Tim Barrow, our National Security Adviser. The continuity of access reflects the extraordinary trust between Britain and

The religious roots of the coronation

It is many years since anyone seriously entertained the doctrine expounded by Shakespeare’s Richard II: ‘Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm off from an anointed king. The breath of worldly men cannot depose the deputy elected by the Lord.’ Nevertheless, on Saturday King Charles III will be solemnly

The battle to restore Britain’s hedgerows

‘I don’t know if hedgelaying is a dying art. But there’s a lot of old hedgelayers that are dying,’ says David Whitaker to chuckles from some of his fellow craftsmen. The occasion is the annual hedgelaying championship, organised by the National Hedgelaying Society, of which Whitaker is secretary. In a good year, the event draws

Inside America’s Satanist movement

The largest gathering of Satanists in history is taking place in Boston this weekend. It’s not open to the public. Or, to be more precise, no longer open to the public. That’s because all the tickets have been sold. They’ve downgraded the supernatural in favour of aggressive secularism, with an emphasis on trans issues The

The Starmtroopers: how Labour’s centrists took back control

On a cloudy Saturday in March, a group of unlikely characters gathered in an office near London’s Old Street for political training. A scientist, a prison officer, an army veteran and four economists were among them and they all hope to be elected as Labour MPs at the next election. A great many of them

Meloni knows that immigration and fertility are linked

Ravenna, Italy Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, met Rishi Sunak this week at the start of her two-day visit to Britain, as part of her mission to convince Europe that she’s a conservative not a fascist. Top of her agenda was the importance of continued military aid to Ukraine, but after that the two issues

The terrible choice facing Russia’s opposition – stay, or go?

There was a time before the invasion of Ukraine when even the Kremlin’s opponents would talk of living in ‘vegetarian’ times. Before 2022, independent news organisations like Dozhd TV, the New Times and Novaya Gazeta were marginalised but not banned. Public protest was punished, but for the most part with sentences in days and months,

How I found friendship through online Scrabble

The internet, as we all know, is a place for rage and hate. It’s a free-fire zone in which even something as apparently innocuous as Facebook – original use-case: posting family snaps for your gran – ends up incubating armed insurrection and spreading 5G conspiracy theories. But what if there was some corner of it

Lara King

Pay and dismay: the nightmare of ‘smart’ parking apps

In Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson bemoaned the ‘wilfully unhelpful’ ticket machines in car parks: ‘You go hunting for some distant pay-and-display machine, which doesn’t make change or accept any coin introduced since 1976, and wait on an old guy who likes to read all the instructions before committing himself and then tries

I’ll be forever grateful to my son’s surrogate

When my husband, Robin, and I first discussed how we might try to have a child, we were against exploring surrogacy. Wasn’t this something that only celebrities did in America? Was it really in children’s best interests? How could you be sure that the women were not being forced? Five years later, and we have

Womb service: the moral dangers of surrogacy

Last month, the Law Commission published its long-awaited report on the legal status of the surrogacy industry. It contained – as expected – one particularly alarming recommendation. Alongside various tweaks to payment and regulation processes, the Commission suggests a crucial change to the parental status of a baby born by surrogacy. At present, the woman

How to find the Holy Grail

If you visit Valencia Cathedral, you will find, in the old chapter house converted into a chapel, the Holy Grail, made up of a humble agate stone and kept safely behind glass. But if it is really the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper (and the Vatican recognises the possibility that it is),

Meet the aristocrat plotting Macron’s downfall

Vitry-le-François Can a modern revolution emanate from the political centre or, more unconventionally, from the heart and mind of an aristocrat who places republican values above factional allegiance? This was the question that propelled me more than a hundred miles east of Paris – while another day of mass demonstrations unfolded in the capital and