Four hundred and fifty years ago, on 23 September 1543, three Portuguese merchants travelling on a Chinese junk were blown by a storm onto the south-western tip of Japan. So at last was discovered to the West that fabled country which Marco Polo repo...

The worries many people have about the Church of England and its future are not confined to the matters most hotly debated in Synod. C. H. Sisson does not pretend to have answers. What he does, in pieces which range over more than four decades, is to...