Free Republic

Crime novelist PD James, who penned more than 20 books, has died aged 94. Her agent said she died "peacefully at her home in Oxford" on Thursday morning. The author's books, many featuring sleuth Adam Dalgliesh, sold millions of books around the world, with various adaptations for television and film. Her best known novels include The Children of Men, The Murder Room and Pride and Prejudice spin-off Death Comes to Pemberley.

PD James: Political correctness ruining society Last Updated: 2:57AM BST 02/05/2008Police hampered by a 'culture of blame' says PD james Modern life is bedevilled by political correctness, PD James, the crime author, said last night. There was a growing risk that Britons would live in "ghettos" and experience little contact with other people, she said in a speech on policing in the 21st century. Baroness James of Holland Park, who is best known for creating the detective Adam Dalgliesh, told an audience in the Palace of Westminster: "Our society is now more fractured than I, in my long life, have...

Suppose for a moment that the birth in Bethlehem that Christians celebrate this week never happened --that it is, as the secularists would have it, mere mumbo jumbo, superstition, a myth. In other words, consider it not as an event but as a narrative. You want to launch a big new global movement from scratch. So what do you use? The birth of a child. If Christianity is just a myth, then it is, so to speak, an immaculately conceived one. On the one hand, what could be more powerless than a newborn babe? On the other, without a newborn...