John Lambert

On 6 May 2004, 52.5 million viewers set the record for the most-watched television show of the 2000s. It was the final show of one of the most popular and highest-grossing TV series of all time - Friends . (I confess that I am yet to watch a single one of its 236 episodes).   The early church was known for its friendship. The Second Century writer Tertullian famously captured the mood amongst unbelievers who observed Christianity from the outside, when he reported them saying: “See how these...

When you consider that we spend about a third of our lives sleeping, it’s amazing how little thought we give to it.   When I was a child I used to hate having to go to bed and I conceived any number of ingenious excuses to creep back downstairs again and postpone the inevitable; (I’m not sleepy, I’m thirsty, I think there might be monsters under my bed, I’m too hot, I’m too cold, there’s a strange noise, my teeth itch…). My own children were even more creative than I was. But by the time they...

Here are a few facts and figures I have gleaned over the years about the human body.   You’re a marvel of creation: 50,000 cells in your body will have died and been replaced by new cells in the time it takes you to read this sentence.   Your fingerprints were fully formed three months after conception. Mathematicians have calculated the theoretical probability of two sets of identical fingerprints (and these dear people possibly need to get out more) as 1 in 1,000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000,...