Why is it that the Chancellor’s annual budget speech always leaves everyone – and I mean everyone – unhappy?  There isn’t, I warrant, a solitary…

I feel much better now. Dame Joan Bakewell, the former broadcaster and writer, a woman of formidable intelligence and charm, says life is happiest when…

The growing habit in business circles of addressing everyone, including customers, by their first names is a habit that has been driving my wife to…

Here’s a statement calculated to invite death threats: people living in towns should no longer be allowed to own dogs. I happen to like dogs. …

News that a friend’s wife has died has left me in a reflective mood on this Passover/Easter weekend. She was in her late-sixties, her husband…

We can be beguiled by three forms of lies, Mark Twain used to say, perhaps borrowing from Benjamin Disraeli: “There are lies, damned lies, and…

Can censorship of speech, or the written word, ever be justified? I surprise myself by reluctantly answering the question in the affirmative.  The reason is…

Even tyrants can be hen-pecked. Mrs. Asma al-Assad, the British-born wife of Syria’s dictator, asserts that she’s the one who wears the trousers in the…

Well, I suppose we had to do something drastic, especially in this year of the London Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, with the eyes…

An intellectual showdown between church and state on the status of marriage might once have been something to relish (or fear) but today it doesn’t…