In so far as politics has become a sporting event, that is to the good. All the surveys suggest that the public is most put off politics when the outcome seems most certain. Give voters a tight contest and they sense their power and their interest. I...

In 1995 only a handful of Microsoft programmers were working on a web browser as the corporation failed to spot the potential of the new technology. When Mr Gates woke up and assigned the project his highest priority, the victim was Netscape, which h...

The potency of the civil liberties argument is bound to be diluted at a time when many in the West believe we are engaged in a "war on terror". The argument from the security services has long been seriously weakened by the fact that many other count...

He asks why it is that my generation turned out to be baby-Führers, neurotically supervising every moment of their children's lives and demanding that teachers do the same. There is a theory that the boomer generation, while young, internalised the w...

It seems incredible that even before Sex And The City, before Desperate Housewives, before every little girl grew up longing for her own Richard Curtis movie ending (she nearly misses the train, there's a stage, he loves her after all, it snows...), ...

Among the casualties was a young man from Dudley called Duncan Edwards, who has been described by Sir Bobby Charlton (who survived the crash) as "the best player I ever played with or against". When one considers that Sir Bobby himself went on to bec...