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Early on our first morning at the Four Seasons Resort, Nevis, still a little fuggy from the previous day's flight to the Caribbean, I'm greeted by Eliza, my sleepy five-year-old: [...]

The US is going through a bout of depression, revolving out of its habitual sunny optimism into a periodic penumbra of self-doubt. Thanks to the illustrated recent history of Abu [...]

I began writing this column a year ago as a personal exploration of transatlantic differences, an examination of the disjunction I feel between my native and adoptive lands in the [...]

One of the two leading US presidential candidates is the subject of gathering despair within his party. Reliable allies are discreetly questioning whether he can possibly win in November given [...]

A while back, in this column, I expressed revulsion at the prospect of my four small daughters graduating from their innocent English childhood to the full horrors of an American [...]

Moral equivalence has long been the most insidious intellectual enemy of American power. The confidence that Americans have in their country as something objectively benign for all humanity has distinguished [...]

I am the kind of person who cannot watch a sun-dappled parade without sniffing for a hint of rain. If I see the proud profile of an aquiline nose I [...]

If you've ever wondered why America is such a religious country, you might want to consider the essentially biblical nature of much of natural life here. Just about every day, [...]

John Kerry, the often nuanced Democratic candidate for president, was unusually transparent in an appearance last Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press, America's televisual Star Chamber of political inquisition. Asked [...]

In his memoir of an eventful one-term presidency published a few years ago*, George H. W. Bush revealed that, as he assembled and led a coalition to wage war against [...]

When my wife, my four daughters and I return to the US after a trip away, we face a choice that captures in its banal way the dichotomous nature of [...]

Tension in relations between America and Europe can lead to tension for those of us who have relations in Europe and America. Having made the transatlantic crossing after the birth [...]

Sado-monetarism, a deviancy popular among certain central bankers and commentators in the 1980s, is out of the closet and back in respectable living rooms. Even as the US economy is [...]

Passive contemplation of the lessons of history is often eclipsed by the active intervention of events. Just as the world's media were lined up to offer their takes on the [...]

Last month, just back from my latest trip overseas, I gave my nine-year-old daughter her customary present. As she fought hard to contain her excitement, I reached into my case [...]

For a long time the weekly conference calls convened by John Kerry's foreign policy team seemed like an exercise in futility. After all, what was the point of creating a [...]

In Washington's fashionably international neighbourhoods, there is a palpable sense this US presidential election year that John Kerry, now confirmed as the Democratic candidate, is carrying the hopes not only [...]

A new religious uproar is sweeping the US amid the furore over Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. This time, it is over a controversial book. The book, a [...]

If the Democrats had pre-scripted their primary campaign, which ended yesterday with the withdrawal of John Edwards and the anointment of John Kerry as their candidate, it is hard to [...]

Several of my children have now reached that painful threshold of intellectual development associated with the discovery of verbal humour. Painful not in any sense for them, of course. Merely [...]

In the 2004 presidential election campaign almost nothing has gone according to plan so far for President George W. Bush. At the start of the year, Republicans were expecting events [...]

Americans are often accused of having a simplistic view of the world. Countries are either free or unfree; their leaders are good or bad; wars are just or unjust; policies [...]

There is something rather poignant about the fact that, on one of the rare occasions when a member of the Bush administration's economics team speaks plain honest economic sense, he [...]

How will you be spending Valentine's Day? A quiet assignation in some bijou little bistro with the object of your affection? Frantically searching for the last bunch of roses in [...]

If you haven't been following the 2004 Democratic primary election, it's too late. It was over sooner than a Britney Spears marriage. It lasted about as long as a Janet [...]

As alert readers may know, Americans are not wildly popular in Europe at present. John Kerry, Madonna and Michael Moore might get a hearing at the average European dinner party, [...]

Now that the American football season has ended we can surely be grateful for one thing. John Kerry will presumably have to stop drawing those painful analogies between his own [...]

The first time I ever watched an American eat, I wondered sympathetically whether she might have some crippling disability of the left arm. Despite the abundance of cutlery flanking her [...]

On the face of it, the oblique interventions this week by David Kay and Lord Hutton on the causes, justification and aftermath of the Iraq war would seem to point [...]

What happens when Howard Dean comes off the medications? Since his infamously primal moment in Iowa last week, the one-time front-runner for the Democratic nomination has been wandering sedated through [...]

With due deference to President George W. Bush, the most consequential speech this week was not the one he gave to the US people on Tuesday night but the one [...]

This week, in accordance with modern political ritual, voters in the midwestern state of Iowa fired the starting gun for the 2004 US presidential election campaign. Between now and November [...]

The Col Ballroom, a gaudy pastiche of Victorianathat sits forlornly in a desolate block of downtown Davenport, has echoed over the years to the great swing and jazz bands of [...]

Paul O'Neill - A Correction This newspaper, along with most others, may have given the impression over the last few years that Paul O'Neill was the most comically inept person [...]

Send back all those campaign contributions; roll up that map of electoral college votes; spare us the attack ads and the photo ops. The 2004 presidential election is over before [...]

Gerard Baker There is a wizard of OZ quality to ex-dictators, stripped of their apparatus of fear, the fawning underlings, the presidential palaces, the torture chambers, they often end up [...]

The forecaster's equivalent of Donald Rumsfeld's 'unknown unknowns' are the events no one could have predicted, writes John Willman. There were plenty of these in 2003, including the failure to [...]

President George W. Bush could hardly have imagined a better end to the year for his administration's foreign policy goals than the events that have unfolded in the last three [...]

Among my favourite pleasures of the Christmas season are the cards from friends who kindly attach one of those one-page summaries of their family's news this year. Each Christmas I [...]

Gerard Baker There is a wizard of OZ quality to ex-dictators, stripped of their apparatus of fear, the fawning underlings, the presidential palaces, the torture chambers, they often end up [...]

This is the weekend when I shall undertake what is surely one of the most enviable chores in any father's life - the ceremonial purchase of the family Christmas tree. [...]

No good deed goes unpunished. A year ago, Joseph Lieberman, the Democratic party's vice-presidential candidate in 2000, graciously deferred his own decision on whether to run in the 2004 presidential [...]

Still thinking about a suitable Christmas present for that special someone? How about The Bush Hater's Handbook? Or The Lies of George W. Bush - two cheery stocking-fillers flying off [...]

There is a simple binary quality to my social life these days. As a father who resides in Washington I no longer have leisurely supper parties that roll on late [...]

Thanksgiving is the perfect model of American exceptionalism. Americans, wherever they are, will today observe the sacred rituals handed down from generation to generation since the Pilgrim Fathers plucked their [...]

In 1992, when he was campaigning for vice-president as Bill Clinton's running-mate, Al Gore liked to repeat a pithy and rather devastating line in his stump speech about the economic [...]