Commentators

Deborah Orr: Face the facts: men are more prone to violence than women

The Government is still aware that anger can on rare occasions be a legitimate response to abuse

Inside Commentators

Hamish McRae: Don't despair over house prices

Wednesday, 30 July 2008

By next summer it's quite plausible that inflation will be coming down, and interest rates should be falling

Amanda Healy: The NHS allowed my daughter to die

Wednesday, 30 July 2008

When my nine-year-old daughter, Daisy, died, a doctor at the hospital said to me: "It's almost like losing a child." What did he think my beautiful daughter was?

Mark Steel: Why do the unions keep handing over their money?

Wednesday, 30 July 2008

What did it do for Gordon Brown's ego, to spend a morning with Barack Obama? There's his guest attracting cheering crowds of tens of thousands in every city, while Gordon must consider it a good day if he completes a speech without making a puddle.

Christina Patterson: I'm depressed by all this happy talk

Wednesday, 30 July 2008

"If you don't have anything cheerful to say," said my father, "then don't say anything at all." That, frankly, was a bit of a tall order. Of course I didn't have anything cheerful to say. I was a teenager, for God's sake. With the advent of spots, and a truly dreadful haircut, my state of mind had switched from relatively sunny to gloweringly unhappy. I didn't follow my father's dictum, of course. I believed in freedom of speech. The freedom to make everyone else as miserable as I felt.

Jonathan Sacks: An equation that leaves out a vital component: love

Wednesday, 30 July 2008

For the past 50 years, our lives have been dominated by two institutions: politics and economics, the state and the market, the logic of power and the logic of wealth. The state is us in our collective capacity. The market is us as individuals. And the debate has been: which is more effective? The left tends to favour the state. The right tends to favour the market. And there are endless shadings in between.

Sean O'Grady: A missed chance to give worlda tax cut

Wednesday, 30 July 2008

Are they dead or just resting on their perch? The collapse of the world trade talks is easily dismissed as one o f those great diplomatic routines, an annual ritual of late nights, sweaty, exhausted trade ministers trading the odd insult, in between wrangles about banana quotas. "Make or break" negotiations collapse in a red-eyed heap on the conference floor. Then they squawk back into life the next year and the cycle goes on. So we have learnt tofilter them out as background noise to other, more vital global tussles. And yet these talks matter hugely.

Anna Fairclough: The lessons all schools need to learn from this judgment

Wednesday, 30 July 2008

Sarika Watkins-Singh, a 14- year-old Welsh-Punjabi Sikh, was forbidden from wearing her kara, a 5mm-wide plain steel bangle, to her state school. Because of her decision to continue wearing it, she was taught in complete segregation from other pupils for almost two months, banned from speaking to friends at school and even escorted to the toilet by a teacher, who waited outside.