[...] And what would these midwives of a better tomorrow not hazard for its safe delivery? What rights would they not curtail? What dissenting minds would they not subdue? What protesting tongues would they not cut out? What unconvinced hearts would they not stop forever? To force open the Gates of Paradise?

OH DEAR, oh dear, oh dear! The biters have been bit – and they’re not happy! To watch Guyon Espiner squirming in his chair as his friend and colleague, Checkpoint host Lisa Owen, oh-so-gently questioned him about what THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER OF NEW ZEALAND had done to him – and of course to the whole splendid edifice of media freedom, including the untrammelled right of the “investigative journalist” to lay waste all things in the name of the sacred public interest.

[...] The Roman Empire, at its strongest in the First and Second Centuries, presented to the nascent Christian congregations of the ancient world a moral and political order that could hardly have been more at odds with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Today’s Christians, living under a globalised and aggressively secular capitalism, know how they felt. If the Apostle Paul was, somehow, required to answer the questions of Twenty-First Century Christians, he would be struck by how closely they resembled the queries of his own time.

[...]The students and their teachers of the late-60s and 70s began to treat the privilege of academic freedom as if it was a right. Very quickly, the universities ceased to be the scholarly enclaves of yesteryear and became, instead, seething strongholds of social criticism and left-wing political protest.

[...] The British people have good reason to thank the British aristocracy for their shrewdness in the marriage market. Had Randolph Churchill not recovered his family’s fortunes by marrying the American heiress, Jennie Jerome, there would have been no Winston Churchill to give the British Empire its “finest hour”.