I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.

I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.

Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.

The conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Anglican church is always rather suspect. It seems too pat and predictable, too clearly a matter of politics rather than faith.

Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.

Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.