The Tablet

“WE JEWS used to keep our heads down, so no one would notice us. We didn’t want to stand out or be seen as different. We just wanted to get on and be accepted as part of British society like everyone else. But now it’s all become very different. Things have changed…” As the sun […]

By Michael Williams     It could hardly be more be surreal. Here I am discussing the significance of the Lord’s Prayer, that most emblematic totem of the Christian liturgy, with the most powerful woman in British Judaism in the magnificent Victorian-Byzantine setting of the West London Synagogue at Marble Arch – church-like in almost

I have just spent three years in the company of some of the most remarkable people in Britain. You probably won’t know them personally – or even bother to think about them, yet they are everywhere in our midst. Often they are treated by society with indifference or even contempt – all the more appalling

The invitation to breakfast came out of the blue from a former Sunday Times colleague who I hadn’t seen for years. As we chatted over scrambled eggs and smoked salmon in a fashionable Soho café, I realised the plan wasn’t to chew over the old days. He told me he been engaged by the national

It was an astonishing admission from one of Rupert Murdoch’s most faithful executives. We’d gone to lunch to reminisce about our years together working at Wapping on Murdoch’s broadsheet papers. This was a man who was once so “on the Murdoch message” that he dismissed an investigation that I had produced into child labour sweatshops

Could there be anything closer to paradise on earth? Long shafts of late afternoon sun were streaming through the west windows of Quarr Abbey as I awaited the start of Vespers, setting aglow the distinctive orange brickwork of Dom Paul Bellot’s great Grade One listed masterpiece in the Isle of Wight. Outside the orchards were