Easter

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 6 April 2017

Cadbury and the National Trust stand accused of taking the Easter out of Easter eggs. The Trust’s ‘Easter Egg Trail’ is now renamed the ‘Cadbury Egg Hunt’. My little theory about the National Trust is that all its current woes result from the tyranny of success: it has become so attached to ever-growing membership (now more than four million) that everything is skewed to this and the original purposes are neglected. No doubt the substitution of the word ‘Easter’ by the word ‘Cadbury’ seemed a small price to pay for big sponsorship. This decision is a symptom of the Trust’s problem. But for the fate of Easter itself, one need not

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The National Trust is compromised by its own success

Cadbury and the National Trust stand accused of taking the Easter out of Easter eggs. The Trust’s ‘Easter Egg Trail’ is now renamed the ‘Cadbury Egg Hunt’. My little theory about the National Trust is that all its current woes result from the tyranny of success: it has become so attached to ever-growing membership (now more than four million) that everything is skewed to this and the original purposes are neglected. No doubt the substitution of the word ‘Easter’ by the word ‘Cadbury’ seemed a small price to pay for big sponsorship. This decision is a symptom of the Trust’s problem. But for the fate of Easter itself, one need not

Tuesday

Rachel Cunliffe

Why has the Prime Minister waded into a fight about chocolate eggs?

Cadbury has changed the name of its annual ‘Easter Egg Trail’ to ‘Cadbury’s Great British Egg Hunt’, callously dropping any reference to the Christian festival celebrated by 31.5 million Brits. (Actually, the word ‘Easter’ appears multiple times in the marketing, but it’s out of the title, and that’s the important bit.) Theresa May has taken this as an opportunity to tell everyone yet again that she is the daughter of a vicar, calling the decision ‘absolutely ridiculous’ and reminding the country that Easter is ‘a very important festival for the Christian faith for millions across the world’. So it is – far more so than the overhyped Christmas celebration. But

Steerpike Steerpike

Don’t be ridiculous, of course Theresa May’s having an Easter egg hunt

This morning there has been much outrage following the National Trust’s decision to drop the word Easter from the name of their egg hunts (previously called ‘Easter Egg Trails’), in association with Cadbury. The Prime Minister has branded the decision ‘absolutely ridiculous’ as Easter is ‘a very important festival for the Christian faith for millions across the world’. Happily Theresa May is flying the flag for Easter egg hunts. Steerpike understands that she will be hosting an ‘Easter egg hunt’ in the Downing Street garden later this month. Mr S recommends the National Trust take note.

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Ghosts of the seasons

Forget killer clowns. Halloween was once a very different affair from the Americanised gorefest it is now. In its-original Irish form, as when I was growing up, it was an opportunity for children to dress up in their parents’ clothes, wear a mask and a hat and go begging from door to door for nuts, apples or money for bobbing — viz, sticking your head in a basin of water to dive after coins and apples. There was barmbrack — a sort of yeasted fruitbread you ate on the night — which contained a ring to predict who would be the next to marry (that dates it) and, in old-fashioned

The Spectator

The King’s contribution

From ‘A Royal contribution’, The Spectator, 7 October 1916: His Majesty has passed through troublous times, in the constitutional controversy, in the Irish imbroglio, and in the war, when passion rose to its highest point. The temptation to go behind his Ministers, and to snatch popular favour at their expense, must have been tremendous sometimes. ‘Remember, I am not responsible for this!’ represents the attitude of many sovereigns who have called themselves constitutional. The King never by a hint, a suggestion, a word, or a gesture has taken the stage against his advisers. For one thing, he was far too much of a gentleman to do so; and for another, he

Thursday

James Walton

Singing Ireland into being

In recent years there’s been a fashion for arts documentaries presented by celebs rather than boring old experts — presumably on the grounds that knowledge and insight are no match for vague enthusiasm and a touch of showbiz glamour. (In a particularly gruesome episode of ITV’s Perspectives, Pop Idol winner Will Young established his credentials for discussing the life and works of René Magritte with the words, ‘I’ve been collecting bowler hats for 12 years now.’) Even so, one channel you might have expected to hold out against such frivolity is BBC4, the natural home of resolutely untelegenic academics telling us stuff they really know about. But then on Sunday

Monday

John L-Allen-Jr

The Lahore attacks are just the latest atrocity in a war on Christians

Imagine if correspondents in late 1944 had reported the Battle of the Bulge, but without explaining that it was a turning point in the second world war. Or what if finance reporters had told the story of the AIG meltdown in 2008 without adding that it raised questions about derivatives and sub-prime mortgages that could augur a vast financial implosion? Most people would say that journalists had failed to provide the proper context to understand the news. Yet that’s routinely what media outlets do when it comes to outbreaks of anti-Christian persecution around the world, which is why the global war on Christians remains the greatest story never told of

Saturday

Pádraig Belton

The Easter Rising centenary shows Ireland more at peace with its past

Here in Dublin, Ireland is busy marking 100 years since the Easter Rising of 1916. It is being celebrated, but with far less chest-beating and bombast than met the 50th anniversary in 1966.  And this is a good thing entirely. The Rising lasted for six days.  Its leaders seized key buildings around Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic.  It started a series of events that led to an independent Irish state in the south, but also to the partition of Ireland and a bloody civil war which claimed between two and three thousand lives. Emblematic of this year’s commemoration was an event on Good Friday, at a Unitarian church on St

Wednesday

Charles Moore

Spectator’s Notes | 23 March 2016

Why have David Cameron and George Osborne overreached? Why are so many in their own party no longer disposed to obey them? Obviously the great issue of Europe has something to do with it. But there is another factor. Victory at the last election, followed by the choice of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, has convinced too many Tories, including Mr Osborne himself, that they will be in power for ten more years at least. So they get careless and cocky. Then they make mistakes. Then they come up against the most admirable fact about parliamentary democracy, which is that you can never guarantee being in power for ten years.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Nuclear waste

Miss Atomic Bomb celebrates the sub-culture that grew up around nuclear tests in 1950s America. The citizens of Nevada would throw parties and stage barbecues to coincide with the latest nuclear detonation in the desert. This musical has a lot going for it. The melodies are strong, and well sung. The high-kicking chorus lines are easy on the eye and the show has a zippy, innocent spirit. But the storyline gets sidetracked in a mass of contradictory directions. The main theme follows a homesick farm girl who becomes involved with a runaway soldier whose brother runs a Vegas nightclub where a beauty contest is being held that the farm girl

Kate Chisholm

Born again

Six years ago, on Good Friday, the journalist Melanie Reid was thrown off her horse while on a cross-country ride in Stirlingshire where she lives. The accident broke her neck and back and left her tetraplegic, paralysed from the armpits downwards. On Easter Sunday on Radio 3 she’s Michael Berkeley’s guest on Private Passions, a timely guest, as he says, because she has recently written in her Sunday Times column about being ‘surprised by a small epiphany of happiness’, of experiencing a ‘rebirth’, if ‘rather cruel’. ‘You find joy in little things …I see all the things that I never saw in my busy life,’ she says, which coming from

Thursday

Harry Mount

Rebel angels

This is the first exhibition I’ve been to where the Prime Minister joined the hacks at the press view. A week after the Irish general election, the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, came to the biggest show in Ireland devoted to the centenary of the Easter Rising. Kenny’s presence at the press launch just goes to show how the Irish rebellion against British rule at Easter 1916 is still the defining story of modern Ireland. In fact, the Easter Rising was a pretty good failure, although I didn’t suggest that to the Prime Minister at the press view. The rebellion lasted only six days before it was put down by the British

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 18 February 2016

Governmental ignorance Sir: Your leading article (13 February) blames junior doctors for playing with lives in their dispute; but what alternative do they have when confronted with the monumental ignorance of our present government (and the last, and the one before that, for that matter)? The NHS, when it started, was propped up by the amazing dedication of the post-war generation and then the baby-boomers. Even so, by the 1960s it was dependent on cheap foreign labour. If people want a first-class service they have to pay for it. It is about time somebody made our government aware of the facts of life — and the junior doctors seem to have

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 4 February 2016

Leave those kids alone Sir: Melanie Phillips was right to raise serious concerns about the emerging practice of challenging children to define their gender identity (‘In defence of gender’, 30 January). She quoted justice minister Caroline Dinenage as saying that the government was ‘very much on a journey’ on this issue. The government should therefore give children space and time to follow their own ‘journey’ of self-discovery and discovery of the world without pressure from above to choose labels to define their own sexuality. They have enough pressure of this kind from their peers. The tried and tested way for society to help children along this journey has been to

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 28 January 2016

Levelling the cricket pitch Sir: As a cricket addict and believer in state education, it pains me to agree with Michael Henderson’s assertion that the future of England’s Test side rests in the hands of private schools (‘Elite sport’, 23 January). The high-performing, 1,700-strong school where I am the head teacher has a grass area for sport that is not large enough for a rugby pitch, let alone a cricket square. As far as the coaching, equipment and pitch maintenance required to play our summer game properly, money talks. While we receive £4,000 a year from the government for each sixth-former we educate, at a local independent school parents are charged

Thursday

A.N. Wilson

Diary – 21 January 2016

Quarrelling about the date of Easter has been a Christian pastime for centuries. The chief bone of contention is whether Easter should be held on 14th Nisan in the Jewish calendar — that is, at a fixed point of the lunar month — or whether it should be held on the nearest Sunday to this date. The Celtic church(es) evidently had their own ideas on the question. In the year 651, Queen Eanfleda of Northumbria was fasting on what she regarded as Palm Sunday on the very day that her husband, Oswy, King of Northumbria, was celebrating Easter. Behind the seemingly batty arguments lay the world-changing conviction that Christ’s death

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 9 April 2015

In defence of Catholicism Sir: Michael Gove gives an excellent defence of Christianity (4 April), but his embarrassment about the Roman Catholic part of the story is unnecessary. He writes of his discomfort as, declaring oneself to be a Christian, ‘You stand in the tradition of the Inquisition, the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits who made South America safe for colonisation … the Christian Brothers who presided over forced adoptions’. The Inquisitions (Papal, Spanish and Portuguese) were indeed shameful, but were often as ineffective as the governments that supported them. The Counter-Reformation was a great movement of spiritual and cultural renewal that altered and improved western civilisation. Jesuits, and other religious orders,

Kate Chisholm

Keeping the faith | 9 April 2015

There was no shortage of Easter music and talks across the BBC networks with a sunrise service on Radio 4 followed by much fuss and fanfare for the ‘live’ relay of Libby Lane’s first Easter sermon as Bishop. A significant milestone for the C of E as women are at last allowed to don mitres and wield a bishop’s crozier. Three, not to be outdone, invited the Revd Lucy Winkett (who had to outride the brouhaha caused by her appointment as the first woman priest at St Paul’s Cathedral) on to Private Passions, where she proved herself an insightful musician and theologian. Her impassioned explanation of the Easter message, the

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Is this the greatest sculpted version of the Easter story? It’s certainly the strangest

In April 1501, about the time Michelangelo was returning from Rome to Florence to compete for the commission to carve a giant marble David, a very different sculptor named Tilman Riemenschneider agreed to make an altarpiece in the small German town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Since then, things have not changed much in Rothenburg. Though battered during the war, it has been restored to postcard perfection (or rather turned into a perfect place for tourists to take selfies of themselves against a Disneyesque medieval background). And the Altar of the Holy Blood is still there, in the place for which it was made, at the west end of the