Hunting

Paris What possible crime has the award-winning novelist Boualem Sansal committed that merits being locked away for three months now by the Algerian police? Listen to the Algerian government – and its cheerleaders on social media – and theanswer appears to be that he is at best a stooge for the French far right, at worst an outright traitor. Friends of the man paint another picture: a gently spoken free-thinker with the courage to speak his mind. Sansal, who is 80 and suffers from cancer, was arrested at Algiers airport on 16 November as he got off a plane from Paris. He has been in an Algiers prison ever since,

Growing problem Sir: The first leading article of the year (‘Growing apart’, 4 January) points to the gap in economic growth between the US and the UK, while the first cover piece (‘Shift key’) identifies a shift rightwards in values and voting intention, in reaction to the bigger state model of Keir Starmer’s government. Sandwiched between the two is ‘Reeves’s new year’s resolution’, in which James Heale tells us of the Labour Growth Group, a WhatsApp group with 99 MPs that is only marginally more credible than a Turkeys for Christmas cabal. Have these Labour MPs studied the research cited in Jon Moynihan’s excellent Return to Growth? Has Rachel Reeves?

When I was a teenager, my closest friend, Henry, would vanish into the Shropshire Hills over the hunting season’s weekends. When he returned, it was with a wind-beaten face, wearing the traditional beagler’s white breeks and green socks, with a leather hunting whip slung over his shoulder. I knew nothing of this world, until one late autumnal Saturday he invited me to join him. As I watched the beagle pack race across the landscape, I realised I had stepped into a magical event, a hunting scene from a medieval tapestry brought to life. I was hooked. To this day, many sporting Christians throughout Europe honour St Hubert with songs and

This week, the Church of England issued its document ‘Contested Heritage in Cathedrals and Churches’. It is guidance for what those locally running more than 12,000 churches should do about their monuments ‘to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and pursue peace and reconciliation’ and address ‘the Church’s own complicity in structural sin’ and ‘oppression or marginalisation of people on the basis of their race, gender, religion or sexual orientation’. In church monuments, this usually boils down to whether the person commemorated had links with slavery. Seen from a parish level (where the poor churchwardens, such as my dear wife, will have to do the

Christian approach Sir: Dr Michael Nazir-Ali’s criticism of our report ‘From Lament to Action’ (‘Bad faith’, 1 May) was wide of the mark in its suggestion that Marxist-inspired critical race theory was the ‘intellectual underpinning’ of our approach. Far from it. The source material for our report was three decades of reports on the issue of racial justice from the General Synod of the Church of England. Doubtless there are valid criticisms which can be made of Synod; however, being a hotbed of radical Marxism is not one of them. Our report explicitly rejects any idea that our work should be viewed as a battle in a culture war. Rather

In modern Britain, the quickest way to prove that you’re a good person is to show that you love animals. People share cat videos and pose with dogs in pictures for dating websites. Anyone who is seen to hurt animals — like the Danish zoo that culled a giraffe or the lawyer who clubbed a fox — is sent to a special circle of social media hell. Those who participate in field sports reside in this inferno: the men and women who shoot, stalk or hunt. They are killers in a society that doesn’t like to see death. When polled, around 85 per cent of the British public are in

The recently departed head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, wants to balance China’s ideological antagonism to the West with the need for coexistence. Commenting on the government’s new ‘integrated review’, he says we must fight back with technological innovation and stronger alliances but avoid a second Cold War. He advocates ‘One Planet: Two Systems’ — a globalised echo of the Anglo-Chinese Hong Kong Agreement by which Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997 under the principle of ‘One Country: Two Systems’. Sir Alex’s is an interesting analogy, but the important thing to note about ‘One Country: Two Systems’ is that China adhered to it only for 20 years

Disastrous decisions Sir: In his otherwise excellent analysis of Boris Johnson’s premiership (‘The missing leader’, 19 September), Fraser Nelson suggests that he could still succeed. It’s too late. Although we ‘know that he’s not responsible for the pandemic’, he is responsible for the government’s response to it. The consequences of that hysterical response, seemingly contrived by a small, mostly unelected cabal, have been, and will be, disastrous for huge numbers of people; the enormity of the failures too great to be set against subsequent successes. Boris persuaded us to support him with a carefully crafted image of a jovial positive thinker, a libertarian and man of the people. He’s been

Puppy shows cancelled. Point-to-points put on hold. Hound shows, team chases, skittles leagues, pony club camp – all have been axed from the countryside calendar. These are not announcements that tend to make headlines. What’s the cancellation of the Cattistock Countryside show when Glastonbury is grinding to a halt? Not that it’s a competition, but it’s a fact that rural areas get overlooked in times like these. In response, countryside folk are taking matters into their own hands. In my own village in Dorset – a village not big enough to qualify for a postbox – Sylvia, an ex-schoolteacher, has decided it’s essential we have a community pop-up shop for emergency rations. At 66,