The truly humble feel the ground beneath their feet every day and do not only become aware of it when held aloft or pushed down to their knees.

Believers are right when they say that to understand a religion properly you need to get under its skin. But to understand it fully, you cannot stay there: you have to take a more objective view, too.

Any celebration meal to which guests are invited, be they family or friends, should be an occasion for generous hospitality.

Wellbeing is a notion that entails our values about the good life, and questions of values are not ultimately scientific questions.

Love is indeed at root the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones.

Yesterday's news feeds our fear that our neighbours are more likely than not to be bad eggs: benefit fraudsters, bogus asylum seekers, paedophiles or jihadist terrorists.

Perhaps the biggest myth about cynicism is that it deepens with age. I think what really happens is that experience painfully rips away layers of scales from our eyes, and so we do indeed become more cynical about many of the things we naively accepted when younger.