Christopher Howse

People sometimes say or even write that Christians at odds with the Orthodoxy of Byzantium welcomed the sudden conquests in the Near East in the 7th century by mostly Arab Muslims.

The most remarkable belief upon which Christians agree is that Jesus commanded them to eat his body and drink his blood.

As I brushed past an elderly woman at Hanley bus station, she said: "Sorry, duck." That regional endearment is alive and well.

A frog that usually lives in puddles and is not surprisingly very rare has just been bred in London Zoo. This good news arrived with the helpful information that it is smaller than a grain of rice.

William Morris, designer of such pretty curtains and wallpaper, was also a revolutionary Marxist. At the end of 1884, aged 50, he set up the Socialist League, with Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor.

The Pope had a serious operation on Tuesday and Catholics and others have been praying for him. But what is a pope for?

A new exhibition illuminates the tension between the artist’s career selling expensive furnishings, and his desire for a socialist society

A detail of daily life – scarcely noticed because it is taken for granted – was added to our houses thanks to a campaign pursued by The Spectator. I mean the letter box in the front door. In 1849, nine years after the Penny Post came in, the...

A detail of daily life – scarcely noticed because it is taken for granted – was added to our houses thanks to a campaign pursued by The Spectator. I mean the letter box in the front door. In 1849, nine years after the Penny Post came in, the Postmaster General mildly suggested that time could

Goya's series of etchings, The Disasters of War, "resonated with the Romantic emphasis on exploring the darker aspects of human existence". You can say that again.