Perhaps I had begun to suspect that something had shifted during our evening in Washington. To my open astonishment, Christopher even cooked supper, a domesticated action so unexpected that I still haven’t got over it. It would be almost as unsettling to come across Mick Jagger living in a Florida retirement community or President Obama attending a meeting of the National Rifle Association. If Christopher is going to take up roasting legs of lamb at this stage in his life, then what else might be possible?
My brother had even given up smoking—a man who once smoked so much, so intensely and with such incessant dedication that one observer wondered if he was doing it simply to keep warm. I am not hoping for a late conversion because he has won a successful battle against cigarettes. He has bricked himself up high in his atheist tower, with slits instead of windows from which to shoot arrows at the faithful, and he would find it rather hard to climb down out of it. But I have the more modest hope that he might one day arrive at some sort of acceptance that belief in God is not necessarily a character fault—and that religion does not poison everything. Beyond that, I can only say that those who choose to argue in prose, even if it is very good prose, are unlikely to be receptive to a case that is most effectively couched in poetry.
Christopher and I had been in public arguments before. We had had the occasional clash on TV or radio. We had debated the legacy of the Sixties, in a more evenly matched encounter than Grand Rapids, eleven years earlier in London. Not long after that, there had been a long, unrewarding falling-out over something I had said about politics. Both of us were urged by others to end this quarrel and eventually, if rather tentatively, did so.
When I attacked his book against God, some people seemed almost to hope that our personal public squabble would begin again. No doubt they would have been pleased or entertained if we had pelted each other with slime in Grand Rapids. But despite one or two low blows exchanged in the heat of the moment, I do not think we did much to satisfy them. I hope not. At the end I concluded that, while the audience perhaps had not noticed, we had ended the evening on better terms than either of us might have expected. This was—and remains—more important to me than the debate itself.
So I will say this. On this my brother and I agree: that independence of mind is immensely precious, and that we should try to tell the truth in clear English even if we are disliked for doing so. Oddly enough this leads us, in many things, to be far closer than most people think we are on some questions—closer, sometimes, than we would particularly wish to be. The same paradox sometimes also makes us arrive at different conclusions from very similar arguments, which is easier than it might appear. This will not make us close friends at this stage. We are two utterly different men approaching the ends of two intensely separate lives. Let us not be sentimental here, nor rashly over-optimistic.
But I was astonished, on that spring evening by the Grand River, to find that—in the middle of what was supposed to be a ruthless, jeering clash of opposed minds—the longest quarrel of my life seemed unexpectedly to be over, so many years and so many thousands of miles after it had started, in our quiet homes and our first beginnings in an England now impossibly remote from us. It may actually be true, as I have long hoped it would be, that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Index
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Abolition of Britain, The, 120
abortion, 30, 52, 86-87, 142, 144, 190
A Man for All Seasons, 147
Ambler, Eric, 34
ancient chants, 27-28
Anglicans, 26, 42, 43, 44, 108, 122.
See also Church of England.
Apostles’ Creed, 25
atheists, 11-12, 25, 137-38, 142, 144, 148-49, 151, 155, 160-62, 172, 181, 201-6, 214
Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh), 109
Austin, John, 72
Authorized Version, 18
Balkan wars, 132-33
Battle of Britain, 60, 65
Benjamin, Metropolitan, 189
Benton, Thomas Hart, 109-10
Bezbozhnik, 174, 177
Bible, 17, 42-43, 108, 116, 135, 185, 208-9. See also King James Version.
Black Hundreds, 179, 189
Blair, Anthony, 159
Bolsheviks/Bolshevism, 136, 154, 158, 170-71, 172, 176-77, 179, 183, 184, 187, 188, 189, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199, 212, 213
Bolt, Robert, 147
Bourne, George, 66
Braddock, Matthew (in novel), 66-67
Bradlaugh, Charles, 185
Brezhnev, Leonid, 83, 84
British Broadcasting System (BBC), 118, 122
British Empire, 36, 73
Buchan, John, 49
Bukharin, Nikolai, 158
Burke, Edmund, 211
Bush, George H. W., 95
Bush, George W., 159-60
Byatt, A. S., 29
Cambridge boarding school, 17, 52
Carey, Philip (in novel), 18-19, 20
Castro, Fidel, 154, 168
cathedrals, 26, 46, 55, 57, 101, 147, 183
Chamberlin, William Henry, 180-81
Christianity, 46, 91, 100, 111, 112, 115, 122, 135, 142, 144, 159, 160, 165, 191, 203, 205
Eliot’s conversion to, 23-24
Evensong at its heart, 26
confusing patriotism with, 78-80
damaged by wars, 80, 133
author’s diffident return to, 92
weakened force in 1950s, 118
marginalized in Britain, 121
the Left’s hostility to, 131
intellectual assault on, 134
Soviet and Nazi hatred of, 137, 138-40
and non-Christian societies, 143
effect of past cruelty, 154
in North Korea, 156
criticized by Trotsky, 158
in Soviet Union, 178, 183
open persecution, 188-92
freedoms flowed from, 212, 214
Christmas trees forbidden, 181
Church of England, 43, 44, 92, 105, 117, 119, 120, 121
Churchill, Winston, 32, 35-36, 41, 56, 61, 63, 64, 72, 100
Cornwell, Jackie, 34-35
Cranmer, Thomas, 107, 111, 112
Cromwell, Oliver, 34, 106
David and Goliath, 70
Dawkins, Richard, 11, 201-4, 206-7
de-Christianized society, 91, 183
Devon preparatory school, 63
Dickens, Charles, 50
Dimanshtein, Semyon, 198
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 34
Downing, John, 92
Duczynska, Ilona, 157
Duranty, Walter, 166
Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns), 23-24, 111; quote, 219
Elizabeth I, Queen, 106-7
Elizabeth II, Queen, 118
Falkner, J. Meade, 50
Fedotov, G. P., 176
films and movies, 37, 78, 81
Fouche, Joseph, 212
French Revolution, 154, 170, 177, 187, 212
Freud, Sigmund, 135, 151
Fullcircle, 49
Future of an Illusion, The, 151
George VI, King, 118
God, 11, 19, 28, 47, 100, 122, 144, 151, 166, 170, 174, 197
Eliot’s belief brings rage, 23-24
Revolt in 1960s England, 31
Opposed in Soviet Union/Russia, 76-77, 85, 136, 138, 159, 164, 177, 186, 190-191, 193
Cost of denial to atheists, 147-49, 154-55
Golden Rule, 142
Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeyevich, 81, 111
Graham, Billy, 119
Grand Rapids debate, 193, 215-16, 218
Grapes of Wrath, The, 110
Great Expectations, 50
Great Leap Forward, 154
Grossman, Vasily, 77
Guardian, The, 185
Hardy, Thomas, 34, 197
Hebert, Jacques, 212
Heidegger, Martin, 148
Hitchens, Christopher, 10, 11-12, 211
childhood influences, 57, 59
ideas on morality, 141, 143, 144
on Soviet Union/Russia, 164, 193-94, 196-98
similarities with Dawkins, 201-3
debate in Grand Rapids, 193, 215-16
relationship with Peter, 217-19
Hitler, Adolf, 32, 138-39, 145, 148, 190, 199, 200, 211
Holst, Gustav, 74
Homage to Catalonia, 56
homosexuality, 52, 122, 131, 162, 190, 204
Hood, Samuel, 34
Horus (Egyptian deity), 23
Housman, A. E., 69
Howe, Julia Ward, 75
Humphrey, Nicholas, 206-7, 210
Hunt, Holman, 161
Hussein, Saddam, 83
Huxley, Thomas, 185
I Flew with Braddock, 66
Islam, 160. See also Muslims.
and Middle East conflict 129-32
and Bosnian conflict, 132-34
Ivanov, Yevgeny, 38
Jacobins, 212
Jagger, Charles Sargeant, 70, 76
James, M. R., 103
Jews, 44, 77, 129-32, 175, 182
hostility toward, 66, 130, 133, 139, 179n, 189, 198
Keeler, Christine, 38
Kelly, David, 169
Kerensky, Alexander, 189
KGB, 37, 83, 85-86
Khimki monument, 199
Khrushchev, Nikita, 191
Kim Il Sung, 155-57, 211
King James Version/Bible, 42, 107, 109, 112, 134, 143
Kingsley, Charles, 204
Kinsey, Alfred, 135
Kipling, Rudyard, 117
KJV, 108, 112. See also King James Version.
Koestler, Arthur, 20
Kun, Bela, 157
Larkin, Philip, 100, 117
Last Judgment, The, 102, 109
Last Judgment, the, 45-46
Last Word, The, 149-50
Lawrence, Susan, 185-86
Lawson, Robert, 35
Lee Hsing, 58
Lenin, Order of, 88
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 89, 136, 157, 166, 172, 174, 183-84, 189, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 213
confronting religion, 171, 173, 179, 190, 194
Lewis, C. S., 18
Life and Fate, 77
Lincoln, Abraham, 115-16, 147
“Little Gidding” (Eliot), 219
“Living Church” in Russia, 179n, 189, 198-99
Lukacs, George, 157
Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 173, 184
Mackenzie, F. A., 184, 185, 186, 187, 188
Mao Zedong, 168, 211
Marcuse, Herbert, 135
Marxism(ist), 106, 120, 131, 135, 157, 158-59, 167, 186, 195, 200, 212
Maugham, W. Somerset, 18
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 200
Men of Glory, 65
Militant Godless, League of the, 175, 213
Milton, John, 22
Mind Made Flesh, The, 206
Mithras (Roman deity), 23
Mogadishu, Somalia, 92-97
Moonfleet, 50
More, Sir Thomas, 147
Morozov, Pavlik, 182
Moscow, 38, 76, 78, 81, 82, 91, 178, 181, 182, 190, 199
brush with traffic police in, 83-84
state surveillance of author, 85-86
Webbs on Bolshevik trials, 167-68
Anti-Christian effects, 183, 185-86
multiculturalism, 121, 132, 133
Muslims, 43, 92, 97, 121, 122, 134, 160, 169, 175, 183, 202. See also Islam.
and Middle East conflict, 129-32
and Bosnian conflict, 132-34
Nagel, Thomas, 149-51
Nasser, Gamel Abdel, 32
National Socialism (Nazism), 133, 137, 138-39
neo-conservatism, 131-32
Newman, John Henry, 204
North Korea, 155-56, 211
Of Human Bondage, 19
Orthodox Church, 133, 172, 174, 179, 198
Orwell, George, 56, 119
Pan, Arthur, 63
Paradise Lost, 22
Paul, Saint, 43
Pipes, Richard, 137
Pol Pot, 211
Prayer Book, 27, 106, 107, 108, 111
Prodigal Son, The, 109-10
Profumo Affair, 36-38
Pullman, Philip, 177, 205
Reich, Wilhelm, 135
Remembrance Day, 45, 74, 79
Revolutionary Silhouettes, 190
Rice, Cecil Spring, 74
Rice-Davies, Mandy, 38, 41
Robespierre, Maximilien, 211, 212
Roman Catholicism, 43, 116, 119, 120, 122, 128, 133, 186, 202, 203, 204
Royal Navy, 32, 44, 55-57, 58
Russell, Bertrand, 197
Russian Crucifixion, The, 184
Sabbath of Reason vs. Sabbath of Christianity, 187
Sassoon, Siegfried, 72
Sayers, Dorothy, 78
science, 23, 46-48, 115, 150, 170-71, 174, 177, 185, 197, 210, 213
Scruton, Roger, 211
“Searching the Scriptures,” 43
Service, Robert, 137, 194, 195
Shakespeare, William, 107
Shuya, Russia, 179
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 188
Somalia, 95. See also Mogadishu.
Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, 167
Soviet power, 138, 164, 191
Soviet Union (USSR), 76, 92, 135-36, 157, 188
final months of, 78
and abortion, 86-87, 190
great power, dismal life, 87
relation to Islam, 132
and liberal intelligentsia, 136, 138
opposition to Third Reich, 138
claimed as religious state, 155, 164
Webbs’ account of, 165, 167, 175
on science and religion, 171-72
Stalin, Joseph V., 64, 77, 136-37, 145, 154, 155-59, 160, 164, 167, 168, 169, 188, 190-91, 199, 200, 211, 213
Stalinists, 198-200
Steinbeck, John, 110
Suez crisis, 31-33, 36
Taylor, A. J. P., 64
Temple, William, 120
The God Delusion, 11, 202
The Oxen, 197
The Virgin in the Garden, 29
Their Morals and Ours, 158
Theory of Historical Materialism, 158
Third Reich, 32, 77, 138-40, 171n, 199
Thirty Years War, 128
Thomas, Edward, 69
Tikhon, Patriarch, 189
Trotsky, Leon, 136-37, 158-59, 190, 194, 197
Trotskyism(ist), 101, 136, 167, 190, 194, 196
USSR. See Soviet Union.
utopianism/utopians, 83, 113, 131, 133, 134, 135, 138, 153, 154, 157, 167, 168, 170, 181, 212, 214
virgins, wise and foolish, 46
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