Governing was always difficult for conservatives, but as they return to the opposition, they are rediscovering their skill at blame evasion.

This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It's authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader-types from consultant-directed puppet-boys.

Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years.

Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practitioners' persecution.

I was in a bad mood when I wrote that.

It is always a disappointment to turn from forthright consideration of some subject - whether from the Left or the Right, a poet or a plumber - to the Beltway version, in which the only aspects of the issue that matter are the effects it will have on the fortunes of the two parties and the various men in power.

Above all else stands the burning question of bipartisanship. Whatever else the politicians might say they're about, our news analysts know that this is the true object of the nation's desire, the topic to which those slippery presidential spokesmen need always to be dragged back.