The Government’s record on the environment leaves much to be desired, and the delay in farm payments – for which her successor apologised yesterday – is a serious lapse. In all, though, she coped more than competently with a very tricky department.Mrs Beckett’s chief merit, however, is her political instinct and her calmness under pressure. [...]

Then they feel guilty and uncomfortable about prying into someone else’s sex life. “The director, Saul Dibb, and I agreed that we should shoot quite a lot of footage of love-making and then see what we thought about it in the edit. Whether you’re writing about homosexual or heterosexual sex, I’m interested in showing the [...]

In a top-floor studio in Leipzig, a group of art students in ragged jeans and T-shirts chain-smoked nervously as they waited for their guests. “I’m asking for the authorities to put it on the internet, even though it was meant to be confidential,” he said.. Meanwhile, scientists and scholars studying the original cave were limited [...]

Despite Microsoft’s desire to tackle the small- to medium-sized business market, Sage has yet to feel the giant’s breath on its neck. Sage competes predominantly with the US developer Intuit, but the shadow of Microsoft has loomed large over the company’s prospects for many years. A 9 per cent drop in mid-market sales in the [...]

Richards, 62, is planning to join the rest of the band for the European leg of their world tour, although the opening concert in Barcelona has been postponed from 27 May to a date in June to be announced. They are being supported by Kaiser Chiefs, Kasabian, the Charlatans and Guns N’ Roses.
Initial reports suggested [...]

Wire One, an American video-conferencing company, has spurned the US technology index Nasdaq and will instead list its shares on the Alternative Investment Market in London. “Some customers were never able to buy boots before because their calves were too big to fit into the boot.”The company promotes its ranges through mailshots, catalogues and websites, [...]

Unleaded fuel prices hit an all-time record of 97.02p a litre yesterday, the AA Motoring Trust said. Prices have risen 2p a litre in the past month alone.
The price of crude oil, which feeds through to prices on the forecourt, surged to a record high for the second day in a row. In New York, [...]

Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, who have a home in the village, attended the museum’s inauguration this week.Before the museum’s opening, all that remained of Graves’ contribution to the island was his tomb in Deya’s cemetery.The Balearic Islands’ regional government bought the house for €2.5m (£1.7m) to create the museum with the help of Graves’ [...]

At the heart of the novel is the relationship between the nine-year-old Suleiman and his mother. Theirs is a desperately tender and fragile relationship, Suleiman having to guard his mother against her alcoholism and the designs of revolutionary guards. The mother’s biography is interwoven with allusions to the plight of Scheherazade at the hands of [...]

More than half of Kinshasa’s eight million people are under the age of 15. Many of the poorest girls, like Esther, are forced into prostitution, making barely enough to feed themselves. In her short life, she has known nothing but war and conflict. Esther nonchalantly takes a drag on her cigarette, while her friends do [...]