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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud. Each week we ask three of our favourite writers from the magazine to read their piece aloud.

I'm Max Jeffrey. On today's

episode, Douglas Murray explains why C.S. Lewis was right about war. Mary Wakefield

looks at the founding myth that Russia and Ukraine are fighting over, and Nicholas Shulman

looks at the curse of Philip Larkin's big problem.

First up, Douglas Murray.

Well, at least COVID is over.

No sooner had Vladimir Putin's tanks rolled into Ukraine than the UK's COVID advisory group, Sage, disbanded.

The same effect was felt in the US, where the outbreak of war in Europe led to the immediate, un-lamented disappearance of Dr. Anthony Fauci. After two years on prime time,

suddenly the good doctor was nowhere to be seen. COVID already seems so very last season.

The climate emergency likewise seems to have drifted away. For years, whenever the world was facing no more

proximate emergency,

every politician from the Scottish Parliament upwards

insisted that we were all doomed and heading to hellfire.

Such thinking captured most developed governments

and terrified a generation of young people with an insistence that we had

at various times, only a decade, a month or a minute to save ourselves. Now those folks have

more than piped down. Putin's invasion of Ukraine has actually made some of them about turn.

Now that a real crisis is occurring in the neighbourhood, even Germany's Green Party has realised

that you can't farm out your ethical energy dilemmas to another country. Germany was all

set to be reliant on Russian gas while pretending that it was as green as green could be. All it

...