The choice was, we know, a risky one. Professional fundraisers warned us that people do not give so readily for such a cause, in comparison with, say, a natural disaster that leaves children starving. The child soldier – or in the case of the girls,...

What, then, will Mr Abe do with a super-majority (thanks to his coalition partners) that can override the upper house still dominated by the outgoing Democratic Party of Japan? It is the Prime Minister-in-waiting's foreign policy that is drawing the...

This is a perversity that does not just affect the NHS. While many workers in the private sector accept flexible hours and seven-day rotas as part of the job, the emergency services generally, local authorities and public transport often depend on g...

The simple truth is that for all the ink spilt and outrage voiced, such incidents have become more, not less frequent since I first arrived in the US in 1991. That October, I was writing my first rampage story, about an unemployed merchant seaman nam...

What is more worrying is how many people actually believe this. They include people who use computers and travel in aeroplanes, but who remain credulous about a supposed prophecy left by a Mayan ruler predicting the end of the world in 2012.The belie...

Where there are guns of any description available to the public (and I can't see us ever getting rid of sporting guns), the opportunity for mass shootings by mentally ill people remains. Even if they can't get guns, they can still mow people down wi...

But victory was not just proof of England's gratifying recovery. It also reflected some lacklustre play by India on their home turf and the sense that the financial lures of Twenty-20 and its showmanship had perhaps distracted the players from the q...

Part of it was the seductive glamour; I fancied keeping a tiny bejewelled firearm in my handbag, as the late Nancy Reagan was reputed to do. But the greater part was practical. If you are living in a country where it is legal to be armed, then you ha...

One way of absolutely ensuring your boyfriend won’t come back to you is by agreeing to be friends with him. And I’m wondering whether this tendency to compliance in you might not be the very reason he’s split up with you in the first place. Complianc...

It has decided to hear both Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor. The former challenges California’s Proposition 8, which was passed by voters in 2008 to amend the state constitution to ban gay marriage. The latter confronts the Defens...

This narrative has been used as a battering ram against their mythically ‘feckless’ and ‘lazy’ workforce who are to blame for their own lack of social mobility.However, these proclamations are laughable when the ‘strivers’ they so admire, particularl...

In October, Chantelle Houghton said that her ex Alex Reid had turned their house into a 'sex dungeon' while she was pregnant with the daughter Dolly before they split. She also alleged that he arranged to meet a man for sex while dressed as his alter...

The Welsh are friskiest as 52 per cent of drivers admitted to having got in on, but only 35 per cent of Londoners had done the dirty in their automobile.According to the survey for confused.com, Women voted men who drive an Audi the sexiest, but men ...

What I will tell her is how lovely it is to see her. I remember her first Christmas, togged out in a little Santa outfit, just two months old. I'll tell her how she was the perfect present for a teenager who thought she'd never have siblings. I'll al...

The conservative Prime Minister John Howard responded with gun control legislation and a mass buyback of about one-fifth of all the firearms in circulation in Australia. As The Washington Post points out, it worked: "Howard cites a study by Andrew Le...

Let's hope the Queen, who gamely went along with his casting of her as a new-style Bond girl, doesn't take his refusal amiss. On the contrary, she might find it as refreshing as we do to encounter a subject for whom the public acclaim for his art is ...

In other words, it was a set-up. Our Protectors helped the Protestant UDA “loyalist” militia to knock off this troublesome lawyer just after a Tory Home Office minister – the very same Douglas Hogg who years later thought he could get the taxpayer to...

That is understandable. I grew up in a home where there was no classical music until late on. In my late teens, I could cope with a five-minute snatch of a popular classic, but anything as long as a concerto or a symphony came over as interminable so...

Anne was not yet eleven years old when she was  married to one of the most famous men in the world. Her wedding day was a dystopian nightmare. She was dragged into a militia camp in the forests of the Central African Republic, where she was raped by ...

The Oscar-winning film director and man behind this summer’s acclaimed Olympics opening ceremony indicated he would not accept a knighthood, were it to be officially offered, when sounded out by the Government’s arts and media honours committee. He r...

James and Lauretta Burke met just after World War II, when a neighbour introduced them. Their 64-year marriage produced nine children, 23 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren. "On each of his daughters' wedding days, he [James Burke] would say the...

I asked a couple of foodie friends for recommendations as to where I should take her, because I always go to the same places – J Sheekey, Maroush, the Groucho Club. It was time to branch out and go somewhere new that we'd both enjoy Ω push the boat ...

The appointment of Lynton Crosby as a Conservative adviser has generated significant comment in the media, much of it focusing on the robust immigration campaign messages he crafted working for former Australian PM John Howard and Michael Howard, if ...

Last week's census showed, for the first time, that more people in the UK are unmarried than married. This was partly due to an increase in divorce, and because of widowed people, but also down to more people just not having a partner. "There were 26...

Now I am not like my friend Ian Bone of Class War, who would ban all such bastions of privilege. For every law lord and defender of the establishment that Eton has produced, it has also produced a radical or troublemaker: George Orwell went to Eton, ...

It's one thing to teach yourself crochet, but astrophysics? Sir Patrick was not afraid, after a long squint at the sky, to say: "We just don't know!" But what he did know was that you don't need a degree to know a lot. It's a useful reminder that, as...