Some people will go to the opening of an envelope. They live their lives in the public eye and get off on it they need it. They need that kind of adoration. If their name isn't in the tabloids once a week they feel like a failure.

As long as the G.O.P. led by its increasingly visible women continues to insist that the problem is not their policies but women's failure to understand their own lives and interests the gender gap won't go away.

For families across the UK who are income-poor but more than that whose lives are blighted by worklessness educational failure family breakdown problem debt and poor health as well as other problems giving them an extra pound - say through increased benefits - will not address the reason they find themselves in difficulty in the first place.

Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

To establish true self-esteem we must concentrate on our successes and forget about the failures and the negatives in our lives.

I have been blessed in many ways and one of those is to have been born in Africa for me a great treasure house of stories. I have been researching it since my infancy reading about it talking to men and women who have spent their lives in this land living it as I have and loving it as I do. I write almost entirely from my own experience.

I feel that between my experience and my mother's breast cancer is a little bit like someone who lives next door. I know what that person looks like and what their daily habits are.

Stories have always been the things that entertain me and make me feel happy and sad and move me and give me the experience of being able to live many lives in one lifetime. It's the best thing about being alive.

A spy like a writer lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

That's not to say that women's priorities are better than men's. Rather when women are empowered when they can speak from the experience of their own lives they often address different previously neglected issues. And families and whole communities benefit.