Inevitably, it is marred by the besetting fault of such negotiations: it has taken too long for the world community to come to this point. Nato could have declared a no-fly zone at the emergency meeting of the North Atlantic Council on 25 February. C...

One can see this entrenchment at work in the current debates about the Royal Family's usefulness. Here, for example, is part of a recent letter in The Lady: "What little we know of Kate Middleton's lifestyle has been gathered from bits and pieces in ...

Nuclear power lies on a continuum of intentional catastrophe. The reactor's innocence is merely a pose, which could be dropped at any moment to reveal the mushroom-cloud. Anyone who tries to contain such monstrosity must be mad, evil, delusional. Soo...

To my surprise and delight, however, our symposium was completely sold out. And not only was it sold out, but punters called all afternoon, pleading to be admitted. "Can you just squeeze one more in?" they said. "I'm very small." In the end, our shop...

According to the vice-president of Google, our credit card companies can now predict when a couple is going to divorce, two years before the couple, with 98 per cent accuracy. There's also a mobile social network (aka a stalker) that can predict in n...

But while the "working class" tag might have been a badge of pride in previous decades it was already an association that they were moving away from: C1/C2 swing voters already talked of their aspiration to "better themselves" compared with their wor...

By normal standards, £30 is indeed a lot to pay for a staple of the Sunday lunch table. But "normal standards" are the problem. In the 1950s, food accounted for 33 per cent of the weekly expenditure of British households. That figure is now 15 per ce...

The Foreign Office appears to have boarded up the glass ceiling, if leaked reports of a reshuffle at the highest level are correct. No woman is being given a top job in moves to be carried out in coming weeks. A domino effect will be created when ...