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Essay: 'I'm Tribal About Sport, Not Patriotic About Britain', Göteborgs-Posten, 12 August 2012

Sat, 1 Sep 2012 12:00:00 UT

'There are many aspects of British life that I admire. There are many that I despise. There are many British traditions that resonate with me. There are many I find abhorrent. There are many moments of British history that bring a lump to my throat. There are many that make me shudder. And there are many non-British traditions that have helped shape my views, my values, my ideals. To erase this complexity in the myths of patriotism is to diminish the very meaning of common values.'

Essay: 'The Mad Circus and the Sublime Games',Göteborgs-Posten, 28 July 2012

Sat, 1 Sep 2012 12:00:00 UT

'It is true that the Olympics Games have become bloated and commercial, shot through with politics and riddled with corruption. They have become vanity projects for administrators and politicians. I wish the Games were smaller, simpler, cheaper. I wish we could be rid of the mad circus that is the International Olympics Committee. Yet, for all that, I cannot hide my pleasure at London hosting the Games or my excitement at the prospect of taking my seat in the Olympic Stadium. For us punters the Games are both much less and much more than they are for the administrators and the politicians, for the supporters and the critics. The Games are about human prowess and endurance and dedication and brilliance. They are about ten-second operas and two-hour dramas. Most of all they are about what one might call the Bob Beamon moment – that moment in which a sportsman or woman transcends the mere present and transforms our assumptions of what it is humanly possible to do, as Bob Beamon did with his astonishing long jump at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.'

Review: 'Poetry of the Taliban' edited by Alex Strick van Linschoeten and Felix Kuehn, Göteborgs-Posten, 1 July 2012

Sat, 1 Sep 2012 12:00:00 UT

'The significance of the anthology is not that it helps humanize the Taliban but that it reveals the complexity of human cultures. A culture that can produce a movement as savage and brutal as the Taliban can produce also a finely-tuned poetic sensibility. That should not surprise us, for cultures are never all or nothing affairs. Every culture produces a host of different and often contradictory sensibilities. The history of Western societies tells us that. The Europe of Michaelagelo and da Vinci was also the Europe that burnt witches and heretics by the score. The England that produced Shakespeare was also the England that transported millions of Africans into slavery.'

Essay:'Moral Compass', New Humanist, July/August 2012

Sat, 1 Sep 2012 12:00:00 UT

'Today, we live in very different world from that in which concepts of religious freedom first developed. Religion is no longer the crucible within which political and intellectual debates take place. Questions of freedom and tolerance are not about how the dominant religious establishment should respond to dissenting religious views, but about the degree to which society should tolerate, and the law permit, speech and activity that might be offensive, hateful, harmful to individuals or undermine national security. We can now see more clearly that religious freedom is not a special kind of liberty but one of a broader set of freedoms. If we were think about religious freedom from first principles today, it would not have a special place compared to other forms of freedom of conscience, belief, assembly or action.'