When I heard that on-line magazine Slate was blessing its female writers with (what Virginia Woolf might call) a blog of their own, part of me felt that it was a backwards step. How different is this development from the establishment of women's pages in all our regular papers decades...

Barack and Michelle Obama are home after a breathtaking tour which took in the G20 summit, the Nato gathering, a symbolic meeting with the Islamic world in Turkey and an unscheduled popping in to see the troops in Iraq since they were en route.

I'm going to miss them...

Hillary Clinton's forthcoming trip to Asia will be the first test of 'smart power' -- America's new comprehensive tool box for international relations. For those who don't keep up with the jargon, smart power is a balance between what Joseph Nye termed 'soft power' (getting results without the use...

London, UK. With less than 24 hours to go before the inauguration, I'm somewhat lost in the Presidential foreplay. From seductive portrait exhibitions of his new eclectic team of advisers to celebrity videos calling us to community action on his behalf. Plus an abundance of messages from

When I decided to fulfill an overdue business trip to the States in the week of the elections, I had one thought in mind: I want to be there when history is made. I swear that on arriving back in London at the end of the week, that I was...

It's Thanksgiving and my gratitude prize immediately goes to President-Elect Obama for his economic team. Not because it was the first team he had pulled together, nor for the accumulated talent therein. I'm grateful for the sheer symbolic power of his choice of team members: alongside the two obvious...

The recent commemorations of the First World War conjured up some wishful thinking for me. Taking in pictures of soldiers in black and white, watching grainy footage of clunky low tech tanks, it was easy to imagine that war was somehow part of the 20th century - a mode of...