AN OUTSIDE VIEW

I have had a visitor staying with me who wanted to read the Papal Encyclical  Mit Brennender Sorge (My Burning Sorrow) addressed  to the Nazis. It was written by Pius XI and came out in 1937. I downloaded it and printed a copy, nineteen pages. Its contemporary relevance is astonishing. Not only have many of the issues that it refers not gone away - on the contrary - the document is as relevant now as it was when it first came out. Next year will be the eightieth anniversary and a good opportunity to bring it to the wider attention of the public.

An excellent response to a not very good article in The Guardian, by Nick Cohen, who ought to know better than to write what he does. I agree with so much of this which is why I'm sorry that Cohen displays such a lamentable lack of understanding of Judaism. His simplistic references to 'Leviticus' and the Ten Commandments do his argument no favours. For while the Torah does indeed specify the death penalty for homosexual and other acts, it was - even in antiquity - a punishment rarely and grudgingly imposed. Jewish religious law demands that anyone accused of a capital crime had to have been warned by two valid witnesses not to commit the crime before s/he committed it in order to be convicted. And the death penalty could not be imposed on the basis of a confession. Furthermore the Talmud contains an authoritative reference to religious courts which imposed the death penalty more than once in 70 years as 'bloody courts'. Of course, you may argue that having ...

Do you remember last autumn's wave of support for receiving unlimited numbers of refugees, following the publication of the picture of a dead child washed up on a beach in Greece? We were told to open our hearts, and demonised as heartless racists if we questioned the wisdom of this policy. The Hungarians and Poles were hit with a barrage of criticism. When the Swedish Sverigedemokraterna suggested that border controls should be introduced, they were indignantly denounced. "Refugees welcome" signs appeared all over Western Europe. I predicted that the mood would evaporate after a matter of weeks. The Swedish government has done exactly what the pariah SD party proposed three months ago. The last vestige of open-heartedness has vanished. The terrorism in Paris and the new year's events at Cologne have done the job more thoroughly that I would have even thought possible.

Being stingy by nature I am reluctant to pay for typefaces when so many are available free of charge. But there are some tasks that the free typefaces do not do well. Times Roman is a pleasant though suffers from being everywhere. It also photocopies badly as the thin parts of its letters are hairline-thin. Smaller than 11 point fails entirely. Times Roman Bold is horrible, which makes the font useless if the idea is to give emphasis. The trouble with Times Roman is that it was designed as a metal type to be printed on absorbent paper, so that the ink would spread and thicken the letters. Unfortunately, when it was digitised, the model was the metal type, not the actual images made on paper. One typeface that gets round this problem is the Plantin range, which was the model on which the original Times was based. It was created about 100 years ago from heavily-inked impressions of a seventeenth century document in a museum in Antwerp. It photocopies well and legibly down to 9 point....