It's been a shortish two and a half years and certainly sweet, but I've decided I have to give up this column. The tug of war between work and weekends has been going on for a long time - work always winning out - and I started to fear I might spontaneously combust. I didn't want my boyfriend to glance into the study one day to find a pile of [...]

Anyone who is particularly fond of sweeping sexist generalisations (and really, who doesn't just love the suggestion that all women are shoe-obsessed chatterboxes, for instance, while all men are emotionally repressed sports nuts?) was in for a treat in the Daily Telegraph this past week.

Recently, the paper featured an article by Sabine Durrant, baldly headlined: "Are men boring?" A ramble through a heap of anecdotes, shot through with science, [...]

Men: it's time to throw away your razor, start fashioning a handlebar moustache, get a crate of beer in and begin referring to women as "the little ladies". In the past few weeks there has been an outbreak of nostalgia for an old-fashioned understanding of masculinity. First, there was the ludicrously overblown launch of the new James Bond novel, Devil May Care, involving a Navy destroyer, helicopters and a willowy [...]

Just reading about the campaign schedules of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama over the past few months has made me want to curl up under my duvet with a cup of camomile tea and a sleeping pill - so I hate to think how they must be feeling. I am writing this before the results of the Kentucky and Oregon primaries on Tuesday, so I don't know whether the gruelling [...]

I've always liked Anna Ford, especially since I read that she is nicknamed "Angry Anna" by some - which essentially just means "a woman called Anna who has an opinion" and is therefore, albeit unintentionally, just about the best thing any woman could be called. And I particularly enjoyed her latest sally in the war against ageism. Speaking to Saga magazine, she asked readers to "count the women over 60 [...]

On April Fool's Day, Barack Obama could be found doing exactly what he has been doing for the past year - glad-handing excitable would-be voters. This time he was at a clothes manufacturing plant in Allentown, Pennsylvania, meeting and greeting the predominantly female workforce.

All went well up to (and, indeed, following) the moment when he reportedly called one of the workers "sweetie". In fact, what with Obama being given [...]

It only ever takes a brief flick through a fashion magazine for me to find hundreds of unlikely garments that I would never consider wearing - even for a £1,000 bet. Those heel-free high heels that are everywhere this season? I can almost feel my ankles snap just looking at them. A suit jacket worn without trousers, or a skirt, or even a sneaky hint of hot pants? Thanks, but [...]

This past week was certainly a busy one for the intrepid culture minister, Margaret Hodge. First up, she caused a minor storm by suggesting that the Proms weren't particularly welcoming to people from a wide range of backgrounds - something I had always assumed too, from the footage of people bellowing anthems and waving Union Jacks on the last night but which, according to Hodge's detractors, is very, very wrong. [...]

For years it has been sneeringly dubbed a Mickey Mouse course, and this past week came the official confirmation - a comparison showed that, yes, indeed, a media studies A-level is marginally easier than an English A-level. Bet that wiped the smiles off the faces of all those kids who passed the course last summer, right? Ha!

Also having their smiles removed: anyone with an A-level in sociology. Yep, it [...]

Whoever would have thought that a public meltdown could be so lucrative? This month the business magazine Portfolio published "The Britney Economy: a back-of-the-napkin calculation of just how much the scandal-plagued star is worth to the multitudes who make money off her". And the figures were startling.

One Los Angeles picture agency, for instance, "estimates that Britney accounts for 30 per cent of its revenue". She apparently brings in 20 [...]