‘The British body politic, once so widely imitated throughout the world, now resembles an empty husk’

‘Our societies have been sustained by the silent majority and by the institutional structures that survived from a more self-confident past. Now these structures too are falling apart’

Michelle Obama’s embrace of the Queen recalls our long-ago monarchs who were more tactile - and much more touchy

‘To dignify the thugs of the "Real" and "Continuity" IRA with the name of dissident is to insult real heroes like Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, Sharansky, and Bukovsky’

‘The decision to ban Wilders was the desperate diktat of ministers who have lost sight of the distinction between arbitrary government and the rule of law’

An abridged version of an address at a memorial service for Rabbi Sidney Brichto, who died on 16 January 2009

Two approaches to mortality: Julian Barnes and Richard John Neuhaus

‘Having banished the West's Judaeo-Christian heritage, we are now investing the advent of Barack Obama with a quasi-messianic significance that no American president can possibly fulfill’

‘It is not inevitable that Western values will remain pre-eminent, but the decline of the West is a self-fulfilling prophecy and for that reason alone must be rejected’

‘Mr Obama subscribes to the European critique of the Bush administration, but the self-abasement that the critics demand from America is as implausible as it is undesirable’