James O'Brien

“Despite the title of this book, it is refreshing, in an age of increasingly reductionist and binary debate, to recognise the importance of sometimes saying the three most undervalued words in the English language: I don’t know.”

“The cultural event being threatened in this case was Christmas, that most Anglo-Saxon of festivals whereby the birth of a Jewish baby in a Middle Eastern stable two thousand years ago is commemorated.”

“The reason why conversations like this are simultaneously so frustrating and revealing is that people like him have lost the desire to question what they are being told. Their bespoke, unchallenged diet of ‘news’, augmented we now know by Facebook algorithms and deliberately fake stories, is so unvaried that the possibility that it might be largely bogus is never entertained”