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...

Despite the insistence that their aims are limited, neither the intervening powers nor galvanised rebels are likely to accept a partition of Libya. The West has no appetite for policing this indefinitely, and the spectre of a Gaddafi victory has conc...

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 ...

Twitter means different things to different people. Some use it as a way to communicate with a small circle of friends. Others speak to millions. Some Tweet incessantly, others are purely Tweet consumers. The site's inventors decided on the name Twit...

Even before the air strikes Gaddafi had not been able to mobilise more than about 1,500 men to advance on Benghazi, and many of these were not trained soldiers. The reason for their advance is that the rebels in the east were unable to throw into the...

Japan is the third-wealthiest country on the planet. Its earthquake and tsunami disaster response plans were among the best of any nation. Tokyo has not requested international humanitarian assistance and has indeed turned down all but 15 of the 102 ...

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...

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 ...