The clamour for political leaders to curtail their holidays when something goes wrong is a simplistic, knee-jerk response.

The residents of Tottenham were demanding answers from the police last night amid accusations that too little was done to control London's worst riots in a generation.

Ruth Rendell is bidding fair to join Defoe and Dickens in creating one of the great criminal cities of literature. Her view of London is a similar murderous topography, less squalid, but with the same tentacles reaching out between rich and poor. The mapping of this novel began over a decade ago with the publication of her A Sight for Sore Eyes, which featured "Orcadia Cottage", a charming old house in St. John's Wood painted by a well-known artist as a backdrop for his portraits of a devoted young couple.

Public face of newspaper Stuart Kuttner, now 71, is drawn in to scandal

As the transition process gathers pace, Kim Sengupta reports from Nad-e Ali, Helmand

It is significant that Mary Curnock Cook, chief executive of Ucas, the University and College Admissions Service, says that many youngsters will have to consider whether their university applications are "strong enough" this year. The case for considering an alternative is, of course, stronger this year because record numbers are applying in the hope of beating the rise in tuition fees to £9,000-a-year next year.

Go to the social networking sites and you will find little reassurance that the public appetite for gossip and virulent opinion is on the wane. Just the opposite

The news that thousands of youngsters with A* grades at A-level will have been turned away by Oxbridge this year is perhaps not surprising in itself.

Public support for a free press in Britain has dropped sharply since the phone-hacking scandal erupted, according to a new survey.

One of Britain's most senior policemen yesterday branded David Cameron's plans to bring in foreign police chiefs to turn around UK forces in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal "simply stupid".

At the close of this novel Lilly Bere, an 89-year-old Irish-American, sits alone in her little house on Long Island after the suicide of her soldier grandson, Bill. He has come back, traumatised, from the first Gulf War. Lilly thinks back to a Dublin childhood. Her family then – two sisters, brother and policeman father - feel closer than the growling storms of the Hamptons shore outside. "There is never a day goes by that we don't drink a strange cup of tea together, in some peculiar parlour-room at the back of my mind."

Boris Johnson would have been "attempting to pervert the course of justice" if he knew police had reopened the investigation into phone hacking when he dismissed fresh allegations as "codswallop", it was claimed yesterday.