Following her decision to write about her preventive double mastectomy in the New York Times, the actress Angelina Jolie has been praised for taking a stand against shallow celebrity culture.

Where our beauty-obsessed, image-driven celebrity industry apparently requires that women be little more than pretty smiles perched on long...

Gay marriage campaigners like to talk about themselves in the same breath as the American black civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.

But compare and contrast the following. Firstly, these words spoken by Martin Luther King at the end of the 1950s: "We do not seek to humiliate...

I'm no fan of the Socialist Workers' Party, so I won't be losing much sleep over the fact that it is currently imploding under the weight of two sex scandals. But I do find it intriguing that this intellectually moribund organisation is having the final nail pounded into...

Why is it always assumed that women are worse at taking insults than men? That there's something in women's disposition - heightened sensitivity, perhaps - which means coarse jests will hit them harder than such jests would hit a bloke? That women are so susceptible to self-doubt that even to...

Apparently, addictive slot machines are sucking the life and the cash out of poor communities. According to research commissioned by the campaign group Fairer Gambling, high-stakes casino machines in betting shops and other venues hoovered up a whopping £5.6 billion in poor communities over the past year.

These machines are...

Why do feminists have such visceral hatred for R&B singer Chris Brown?

Some will say the answer is obvious: it's because he beat up Rihanna. It's because in February 2009, as they were driving home from the Grammy Awards, Brown launched a horrendously violent assault on Rihanna which...

If you were abused by Jimmy Savile 30 or 40 years ago, is it really wise to reveal all now, or would it be better to keep it to yourself?

I think it's the latter. I think there is more virtue in keeping the abuse as a firm part of...

In the year 897, in one of the maddest moments of the medieval period, the Catholic Church dug up the dead body of Pope Formosus and put it on trial for perjury. It was known as the Cadaver Trial. Now, more than a millennium later, we have another Cadaver...

Following the publication of the damning report on the Hillsborough disaster, there have been paroxysms of handwringing in the political and media classes.

David Cameron issued an apology for Hillsborough's "double injustice": first the disaster itself, which killed 96 Liverpool football fans, and second officialdom's attempts...

"Sex without consent is rape." Those words, or an approximation of them, were uttered by just about every feminist commentator over the past week.

In response to George Galloway's creepy defence of Julian Assange's alleged behaviour in Sweden - which was just "bad sexual etiquette", not rape, said Galloway -...