the Queen's Household, opened the inquest on Diana, Princess of Wales, the conclusion of which, he said, would not come for more than a year: he had asked Sir John Stevens, the...

0 n Sunday, Tony Blair told the troops in Basra that they were 'new pioneers of 21st-century soldiering'. The praise was fully deserved and sincerely delivered. Over his years...

S ix months can be an awfully long time in politics When I wrote here only last July that the Tories knew in their hearts they could never win an election under fain Duncan...

STEPHEN GLOVER I must confess that I have not watched the development of Ofcom with the care I should have. In the distance I heard the voices of colleagues muttering that the...

Peter Oborne says Lord Hutton must conclude that Tony Blair played the primary executive role in the events that led to the naming of Dr David Kelly and to his suicide L ast...

Veronica always leaves a copy of Viz around in the kitchen, like a cat leaving a dismembered frog on the lino. A regular feature of this comic for 'adults' is Roger(Mellie)'s...

Driving fast is dangerous, says Ross Clark, and the middle classes should stop whining about attempts to slow them down I am beginning to feel a bit lonely among fellow...

You can lower taxes and improve public services, says James Frayne. The Tories must therefore copy George W. Bush and give us back our money I f you are lucky enough to be in...

programme touching every aspect of its activities, driving increased productivity, flexibility, customer orientation, leadership and accountability across the organisation. As a...

Mark Steyn says the Democrats are gearing up for their inevitable humiliation by calling Bush-supporters 'stupid'. It's the 'S' factor in the presidential election New...

A weekly survey of world restrictions on freedom and free trade Every year, according to a new report by the World Health Organisation, 150,000 people succumb to the effects of...

The Russian President is a nationalist, not a communist, says Paul Robinson, and has much in common with the men who fought the Bolsheviks in the civil war T he victory of...

Don't laugh, says Hugh Russell, but a white journalist may be deported from Zambia for having written a column in which he depicted leading politicians as wild animals Lusaka I...

and grieve If Lynne Truss wants to set herself up as an authority on language, says Benedict le Vay, she should improve her English Av ere you given the book Eats, Shoots and...

FRANK JOHNSON C enturies, historians now say, are not so simple as just to start with their first year and end with their last. For exam ple, the 19th century was at home the...

_1 1 :1] PAUL JOHNSON Nv e do not think of England as a place for spectacular weather. Shuddering at the dreadful earthquake in Barn, a friend said, 'Thank God we only have...

CHRISTOPHER FILDES D o not tell Gordon Brown that the economy's prospects are golden, or not unless you want your nose pushed sideways. Gold is a touchy subject with him. It...

Philip Hensher BROWNING: A PRIVATE LIFE by lain Finlayson HarperCollins, 130. pp 758, ISBN 0002555077 R obert Browning, in life, was always immensely popular in a worldly way;...

Quiet November day, tugging wind sporting with lost leaves of lost seasons, was to him like a return to true England. Quiet purposeful sound of it: a day of rivers somewhere, a...

Nicholas Fearn THE SPACE BETWEEN OUR EARS: How THE BRAIN REPRESENTS VISUAL SPACE by Michael Horgan Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 199, ISBN 029782970X W e think of our eyes as windows...

Ian Garrick Mason OPERATION HEARTBREAK AND THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS by Duff Cooper and Ewen Montagu Speilmount, £18.99, pp. 200, ISBN 1862271879 1 n the spring of 1943, Allied...

Rob White MOVIE POSTER by Emily King Mitchell Beazley, £25, pp. 224, ISBN 1840006536 F ilm posters are not made to last. They appear on billboards, then they are torn down or...

Montagu Curzon MY LIFE IN ORANGE by Tim Guest Granta, £12, pp. 300, ISBN 1862076324 T im Guest spent his boyhood in the Rajneesh spiritual communes during their heyday in the...

Jonathan Sumption THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR: ATHENS AND SPARTA IN SAVAGE CONFLICT 431-404 BC by Donald Kagan HatperCollins, £25, pp. 511, ISBN 0007115059 T his book is an abridged...

Anthony Hobson BECKFORD'S FONTHILL by Robert J. Gemmett Michael Russell, £35, pp. 473, ISBN 0859552845 W illiam Beckford's Fonthill Abbey is thought of as a supreme example of...

Anne Sebba MADNESS VISIBLE by Janine di Giovanni Bloomsbury, 416.99, pp. 273, ISBN 0747560560 1 nJuly 2001, a few days after Slobodan Milosevic was flown to the War Crimes...

Laura Gaswigne on how today's young and hip art buyers are more likely to go to fairs than galleries I n the 1960s a cosmopolitan collector friend of my father who had fallen...

Andrew Lambirth Gerhard Richter: Atlas Whitechapel Art Gallery, unti114 March G erhard Richter (born in Dresden in 1932) appears before us garlanded with honours, despite the...

Peter Phillips O ite of the most heartening realisations to have come out of the binge-laden atmosphere of recent days is that globalisation has led to highly specialised...

Ursula Buchan S OD it, SOD it, SOD it! How many garden owners of unimpeachable respectability must have allowed themselves the relief of an expletive or three as they read the...

Mark Steyn Lost in Translation 15, selected cinemas S ofia Coppola's Lost in Translation begins with a close-up of a young lady's bottom, lying on a bed, sheathed in...

Lloyd Evans A Weapons Inspector Calls Theatro Technis Call Me Merman King's Head Revelations Hampstead T he Left are always right and the Right are always wrong. This is the...

James Delingpole y ou weren't expecting that at this time of year I'd give you a measured critique of the week's most important TV programmes, were you? Phew. Apart from the...

Michael Vestey y ou would think that people who leave the armed forces for civilian life would be ideal employees: they understand discipline, leadership and what modern...

Talu Gstaad D efying orders or laws one believes to be wrong is a sign of courage, not insubordination, and those who refuse to obey in the knowledge that it will cost them...

Jeremy Clarke A f f ter the pub it's all back to Sharon's or a party. An odd juxtaposition of two prominent local constituencies in attendance: representatives from the...

Petronella Wyatt Cape Town C Town is as different from ‘,....Johannesburg as Cheltenham is from London. Actually, this is to insult Cape Town. But whereas Jo'burg, being the...

Jaspistos In Competition No. 2322, drawing inspiration from Coward's 'Nina from Argentina', you were invited to supply a lyric about another eccentric and exotic lady. Jeremy...

MICHAEL HENDERSON 1 t certainly cannot be said that Theodore Dalrymple in his brilliant commentary last week left anybody in any doubt about what modern Britain means to him....

Q. Mary, please help. How can I stop cold callers shattering the peace of my home life with telephone marketing? Neighbours think it funny to pretend that the 'homeowner' is...