Peter Hitchens, Author at Catholic Herald

Peter Hitchens

‘The ways deep, the weather sharp’: A journey in the Magi’s footsteps

December 19, 2019

As a child I found it hard to believe that the world east of Bethlehem was real at all. This was a region where fire might fall from Heaven on the prophets of Baal, or angels appear overhead, or seas divide and then close again over your head. The atlases and encyclopaedias in which I

The BBC can’t admit its abortion bias

April 04, 2019

Of all the ridiculous things the BBC has ever said to me, while trying to pretend to be impartial, perhaps the most absurd is this: ‘‘Where the BBC’s editorial guidelines refer to ‘due impartiality’, the term ‘due’ refers to requirement for impartiality ‘adequate and appropriate’ to the output in question. This means that for drama

Germany’s discontents

November 29, 2018

Peter Hitchens visits Germany and Scandinavia

Diary: by Peter Hitchens

September 20, 2018

The more I write about Britain’s moral, educational and cultural decline, the more I run up against that decline in action. For the past few weeks I have been re-launching my 19-year-old book The Abolition of Britain. This, my first venture between hard covers, has defied its many enemies by surviving in print for almost

The riot that never ended

May 09, 2018

In 1968 itself it often felt as if they had put something in the water. It was a mixture of longing and exhilaration, and that choking feeling that something important was going on somewhere nearby, and you would have no peace of mind until you found it. In fact, I now think, they had put

Peter Hitchens: What’s happened to Philip Pullman?

November 02, 2017

Philip Pullman used to be more of a cause than an author. But he has lost his way

Peter Hitchens: What’s happened to Philip Pullman?

November 02, 2017

Some years ago I said that Philip Pullman was the most dangerous author in Britain. He pasted the cutting on his study wall and boasted publicly that he would see that the words were printed on the covers of future editions of his books. They never were, perhaps because his publishers thought that such an

Peter Hitchens: Britain before the revolution

June 22, 2017

The great test of prose is to read it out loud. If it works, well and good. If not, it will be leaden on the page and in the mind. This is why Dickens still has such power to move, long after other 19th-century writers have become monuments or subjects for academic study. It is

Peter Hitchens: Why I stand up for Russia

July 21, 2016

How odd that scorn for Russia, and fear of that country, have become fashionable in Western countries even – sometimes especially – among conservative-minded and Christian men and women. This view is so common that people automatically assume that I share it in conversations and correspondence. When I object, they are often puzzled, or immediately

How divorce became normal

May 12, 2016

Henry VIII never got a divorce. If so many people (especially the authors of history books) didn’t get this simple fact wrong, they would understand the state of marriage in Britain a lot better. Henry’s marriages to Katherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves were both annulled according to canon law. The Church of England, then and

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