Melanie Phillips

One of the functions of the honours list is to make the nation feel good about itself. It’s not just that the individuals on the list are being honoured for their achievements. Its also that the nation as a whole feels uplifted by those awards and what they represent.

For anyone who may have been on another planet this past month, here is exciting news of the launch of my own electronic book imprint emBooks, and its first batch of titles including my memoir, Guardian Angel. Enjoy!

Never did three words, surely, have a more explosive and utterly disproportionate effect.

And so it came to pass. Samantha Power has finally made it into the top tier of the Obama administration.

You've really got to hand it to Dr Rowan Williams, the erstwhile Archbishop of Canterbury – he's got a sense of timing to die for.

Google, the internet giant and acme of cool, may be fast descending from hero to zero.

Ever since the spectre of Islamic terrorism in the West first manifested itself, Britain has had its head stuck firmly in the sand.

The reported "killing" of Mohammed al Dura in a hail of Israeli bullets was nothing of the kind and was instead a modern-day blood libel. So said the state of Israel this week. What kept it?

There’s been some stiff competition over the past 24 hours for the coveted award of Most Fatuous Reaction to a Jihadi Atrocity.

Sometimes, you can gauge someone’s quality from the enemies they make. By that standard, the embattled Education Secretary, Michael Gove, is a person of the highest quality.

Truly, it seems that scarcely a day now passes without our being informed of yet another celebrity accused of sexual depravity.

Fort Hood, Benghazi, the Boston bombings, Iran/Syria, Israel. The pattern is unmistakeable; the danger to America is exponentially increasing; the scandal is deepening into something nearer to a national crisis.

I am delighted to announce the launch of a major new publishing venture, Melanie Phillips Electric Media. You can learn more about it on my new website www.embooks.com -- which is due to go live in a few hours' time.

I'm in Washington DC at present, squinting at the results of the local government elections in Britain and the damage done to the Tories in particular by the UK Independence Party -- no less of a shock to the political system for having been widely trailed.

A group of sex education ‘experts’ has suggested that pupils should be taught in school about pornography, on the grounds that it is not ‘all bad’ and can even be ‘helpful’ to them.

When the journalistic world protested almost as one after the publication of the Leveson proposals to regulate the Press, others dismissed these objections on the grounds of: ‘Well, they would, wouldn’t they?’

Yesterday's BBC Radio 4 Today programme informed us that Brighton's local public health agency may introduce what is euphemistically called a drug 'safe consumption room', otherwise known as a 'shooting gallery'.

Yesterday's BBC Radio 4 Today programme informed us that Brighton's local public health agency may introduce what is euphemistically called a drug 'safe consumption room', otherwise known as a 'shooting gallery'.

What was so moving, in the end, was that Baroness Thatcher was buried as a simple Christian.

As David Cameron prepared for the funeral of one of his greatest predecessors, there was another, less advertised but also significant, signalled exit from the political world last week.