It is telling that on these letters pages Israel’s advocates regularly mirror and thereby demonstrate exactly what is wrong with the actions of that state.

HITCHENS’ death in 2011 robbed the world of one of its foremost critics of cant, tyranny and puritanism.

With female comedians taking centre stage, it’s like women have finally crossed a frontier that eluded them for generations, says Ed Power.

THIS week, I learned on social media that a religion is like a penis. It’s fine to have one, and fine to be proud of having one, but it’s not fine to get it out in public, especially near children. Nor is it fine to write laws with it, nor to think with it.

Henry Kissinger

G Cunningham (Letters, Aug 3) proposed that to be religious is to have a virus. Is this the religion that abolished slavery; promotes justice and equality; cares for the sick, homeless and poor; encourages love, compassion, honesty, family values and community?

When the Bush administration decided to go to war in 2003, David Frum found himself at the centre of a daunting messaging effort. He looks back on the fraught times that followed Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’ speech

Mortality

Lady Gaga is donating her peace award to charity.

MASS MARKETFICTION

A BOOK bought for me as a birthday present a few years ago bears an inscription which says: “I saw this and thought of you.”

AS a believer (and recovering atheist), I am constantly bemused by the irrationalities/contradictions of my former comrades.

USUALLY, the end of year column runs along lines as familiar as the main tracks from Kent to Heuston.

TRIBUTES poured in yesterday for journalist and atheist intellectual Christopher Hitchens, who died aged 62.

The British-born author and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died. He is best known for his provocative best-seller 'God is Not Great'.

A CERTAIN amount of background noise seems to have been building in recent weeks about TV coverage and sport, and the quality of that coverage in particular.

Martin Amis: The Biography, Richard Bradford

The reaction of the major faiths to intimate acts ranges from the bizarre to the insane, writes Suzanne Harrington

ANOTHER day, another existential crisis.During the week we were struck down by one of those periodic ‘what’s it all about, eh’ phases, the kind that forces you to evaluate what you’re doing.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said today his religious beliefs did not play a role in his decision to support the US invasion of Iraq.

On Evil

IT’S a great pity that you chose to reprint (April 28) Christopher Hitchens’s ridiculous defamation of Pope Benedict XVI in which he presents a preposterous argument for charging the pontiff with involvement in organised crime.

David Lewis-Williams

OLIVER BRODERICK (Letters, October 22) says he is going to ask Fr Con McGillicuddy for his bullet-proof vest to protect himself after his long dismissal of all Richard Dawkins’s “disciples” and the apparent lack of “evidence” to support Dawkins’s arguments.

ONCE upon a time and far, far away, there were these galaxies.

British journalist Christopher Hitchens today claimed that former US President Bill Clinton was spying for the CIA while they were students together at Oxford University.

THE Pope yesterday approved a miracle attributed to Mother Teresa's intercession, paving the way for the nun who dedicated her life to the poor to be beatified and possibly made a saint.