The list of things God tells George W Bush to do may be longer than we thought. Leave the sugar in fizzy drinks; teach children the unreliability of condoms; see through the hoax of global warming. Oh, and stifle embryonic stem cell research and appoint theologically correct policy advisers.

The American conservative movement, as Chris Mooney points out in this fiercely anti-Republican book, has brought together two powerful constituencies - [...]

Rosemary Kennedy was the most famous victim of lobotomy. When the prettiest but mentally retarded daughter of Joseph P Kennedy showed signs of agitated depression in 1941, the Boston millionaire bought the latest treatment available. It left his daughter unable to care for herself, confined from the age of 23 to an institution in Wisconsin, an embarrassing footnote to her famous family's history. None of them even visited her until [...]

At the memorial service for the journalist Anthony Sampson at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London this month, Sir Tony O'Reilly, giving a tribute, said he had asked a friend what he should do if his mobile phone rang while he was in the pulpit. "Answer it," said the friend. "It might be Anthony."

We all laughed. But there is something surreal about these pocket gadgets that allow us to speak to [...]

As the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday approaches, you might be tempted to cry, "Call the whole thing off!" Dublin's celebration of the day recorded in James Joyce's Ulysses lasts five months this year, and seems rather absurd. Joyce believed that nobody with any self-respect stays in Ireland. He left at the earliest opportunity and called his country the "afterthought of Europe", "the old sow that eats her farrow" and "a [...]

Who ever said science-writing was easy? You've got to do something to make the medicine slip down, right? So why not a breezy narrative style? OK. So if you've got a tolerance for Yiddishy slang and abundant split infinitives, with large helpings of my psychological quirks - and yeah, my husband's, too (he takes cocaine, for constant pain) - why not follow me through the tale of ten major psychological [...]

In his poem "Tortoise Shout", D H Lawrence asks: "Why were we crucified into sex?/Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves . . . ?" Bryan Sykes has a ready answer: survival. Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford, explains that those species which replicate with two sexes are more durable, more genetically varied, better able to withstand parasites than those - such as dandelions, greenfly [...]

At the end of a three-year book, I am stuck at the hardest part: the Acknowledgements. The permutations of thanks - clumsy, neologistic and mawkish - can be found as apparatus in most non-fiction. British publishers like to tuck them at the beginning, on the pages with the roman numerals. American publishers, inhabiting a less cosy literary world, tend to put them at the back. For the front, they go [...]

As Radio 3's Verdi orgy rolled on the other week, the name of the composer's mistress caught my ear: Giuseppina Strepponi. Strepponi? Where do they get these surnames? Italians, I mean. There seem to be no two alike.

I remember this from the melting pot of my small Massachusetts home town, where a last name was sufficient to reveal religion and neighbourhood. The Yankees lived downtown near the common and [...]

Move over, Mozart. How's this for the work of a 12-year-old child: "Happy indeed, unspeakably happy, are those people who, when at the point of death, are able to say, with a satisfaction none but themselves can have any idea of: I have done with this world, I shall now have no more of its temptations to struggle with." Thus the young William Hazlitt wrote, in 1790, from a summer [...]

Nostalgia for vanished stadia runs deep (have you seen Gladiator?). But there are no ruins of the late Cardiff Arms Park. The legendary home of Welsh Rugby Union was demolished stone by stone so that the new Millennium Stadium could rise on the same ground between the banks of the Taff and Cardiff Castle. And rise it has, to shelter crowds of 80,000 under its retractable roof: not an empty [...]