Erotic fiction has been languishing on the top shelf for years, but a new generation of women writers is moving it from the fringes to the literary mainstream, with candid bestsellers such as The Sexual Life of Catherine M blazing a trail.

We meet five authors whose explicit prose is unleashing 'posh porn' on an ever-increasing market.

As a publishing trend it might best be summed up thus - from big knickers to no knickers. Ten years ago the bestseller lists were topped by the frustrated Bridget Jones, a fictional creation less interested in sex than in the cigarette she could smoke afterwards.

Part of her popularity - and that of the clones that followed - was that she was far too neurotic to be good in bed. It was romance, not lust, which made her pulse beat faster.

A decade on and chick lit now seems curiously chaste, as lascivious as a warm mug of Horlicks. But a new kind of explicit bedside reading, both fictional and autobiographical, means the three-for-two counter in Waterstone's now displays the kind of X-rated material more traditionally found in a cornershop in Soho.   more »

No concept lies more firmly embedded in our national character than the notion that the USA is "No. 1," "the greatest." Our broadcast media are, in essence, continuous advertisements for the brand name "America Is No. 1."

Any office seeker saying otherwise would be committing political suicide. In fact, anyone saying otherwise will be labeled "un-American."

We're an "empire," ain't we? Sure we are. An empire without a manufacturing base. An empire that must borrow $2 billion a day from its competitors in order to function.

Yet the delusion is ineradicable. We're No. 1. Well ... this is the country you really live in:

• The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (The New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004).

• The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).   more »

Francis Fukuyama turns on Bush's foreign policy in his brutal critique, After the Neocons*.

This book is a brutal critique of neoconservatism as practised by the Bush administration: and it is all the more damaging for the fact that Francis Fukuyama has himself been strongly identified with the neo-conservative cause.

His tone is measured but the comprehensive nature of his demolition of Bush's foreign policy leaves it - and neo-conservatism - in tatters. What, of course, has really done for Bush is "events", above all those in Iraq.

Rarely has a policy been exposed so rapidly and comprehensively on such a grand scale, but then wars have a habit of doing precisely that: the rhetoric and platitudes are suddenly and mercilessly subject to the cold test of reality.

Fukuyama is good at reading "the moment", the most famous example being The End of History, a rather poor book that received far more attention than it deserved, but which succeeded very effectively in capturing the zeitgeist after the collapse of the Berlin wall.

One suspects that Fukuyama has accurately read the runes once more and that his book anticipates a sea-change in the American mood. Indeed, the latter seems already to be under way, with support for Bush dipping to new and dangerous lows.   more »

Millions of wised-up Americans are turning away in disgust from their spinning, dumbed-down TV.

"America is one of the best entertained and least informed nations on the planet." I wanted to add: "Discuss". But this is not an academic exercise: it's reality.

After five months in New York, I am no longer regarded as a freshman; more of a seasoned veteran. And yet still I can't work out where to find anything on the television.

More to the point, I can't find much that is interesting. My entertainment was, I had hoped, to have come in the shape of the new series of The Sopranos, but then I discovered that the HBO channel, which carries the programme, was yet another expensive add-on to the 100 mushy channels on the digibox.

But TV entertainment comes in as many forms as there are reality series. What is really missing is the hard-headed analysis, straight news reporting and informed documentary that made US newscasters such as Walter Cronkite national institutions.

Most Americans I speak to are painfully aware that television news has perhaps been irrevocably dumbed down. Some cite deregulation; others, more specifically, legislation pioneered during Ronald Reagan's tenure, when TV stations were permitted to abandon even the pretence of balance.   more »

More evidence that the U.S. government is justifying surveillance of political dissidence under the guise of monitoring "terrorism" has recently come to light.

Early this March an FBI agent's presentation at the University of Texas law school listed Indymedia, Food Not Bombs, the Communist Party of Texas and "anarchists" as groups on the FBI's "Terrorist Watch List" for central Texas.

On March 8, 2006, FBI Supervisory Senior Resident Agent G. Charles Rasner, delivered a guest lecture before professor Ronald Sievert's U.S. Law and National Security class of approximately 100 students. Accompanying his lecture was an "unclassified" PowerPoint presentation titled "Counter-Terrorism Efforts in Texas."

According to UT law student Elizabeth Wagoner's account of Rasner's lecture on Austin Indymedia:

"On a list of approximately ten groups, Food Not Bombs was listed seventh. Indymedia was listed tenth, with a reference specifically to IndyConference 2005.

"The Communist Party of Texas also made the list. Rasner explained that these groups could have links to terrorist activity. He noted that peaceful-sounding group names could cover more violent extremist tactics."   more »

Bush's foreign policy has failed ignominiously in Iraq, but where does that leave the liberal imperialists?

Liberal imperialists, 1990-2006, RIP? Hardly, but their tails are down. And so they should be. I am referring, of course, to a school of thought associated with the left that took wind after the end of the cold war and came to believe that the US was a benign power that could intervene around the world for the good of democracy and human values.

In the mood that prevailed after 1989, it was perhaps not entirely surprising: the left felt defeated, and many busily took the road of rejecting everything from their past as mistaken.

This, for some, included the warm embrace of the US. The first Gulf war was easy to support, and so was American intervention in the Balkans tragedy.

The US was not just the global policeman: it was the friendly bobby down the street, waiting to deliver good sense and virtue to some faraway country.

And so we had the spectacle of left figures rushing to support the US occupation of Iraq. It would bring democracy to Iraq, they proclaimed; human rights as well; peace to the region, and the end of a global threat.   more »

Has Latin America ever had such a unifying figure?

At political rallies, his visage is held aloft as a beacon to regional independence and self-determination. He's helped forge new trade partnerships to spur economic growth and alleviate poverty.

And his leadership has fanned a gale-force electoral trend that's sweeping the hemisphere to topple one pro-Washington government after the next.

Who is this grand inductor of Latin American leftism? Venezuelan fireball Hugo Chavez? Blue-collar Brazilian Lula Ignacio da Silva? Bolivia's coca-farmer-cum-president, Evo Morales?

¡Epa! It's George W. Bush, the accidental revolutionary.

In the past five years, the swaggering Texan has inspired a leftward surge that is uniting Latin America and threatening to knock Che Guevara right off all those natty t-shirts.   more »

The most striking feature of the Middle East today is the total absence of a balance of power.

As a result, the powerful continue to pursue their goals without restraint while the weak and down-trodden hit back as best they can. Violence and counter-violence, terror and counter-terror, have become routine and death is an everyday occurrence.

What clearer evidence can there be of the breakdown of international order in the region than the two colonial wars which continue to rage in Iraq and Palestine, without the international community being able to bring the aggressors to their senses? In both theatres, the United States and Israel continue to act with the greatest impunity.

With hindsight, one can see that the present dismal state of affairs is largely the product of two main factors and two minor ones.

The first main factor is no doubt the collapse of the Soviet Union some fifteen years ago and Russia's relative absence from the Middle East scene ever since.

Major Arab states like Egypt, Syria and Iraq -- as well as the Palestinian liberation movement -- never fully recovered from the loss of their Soviet sponsor.   more »

27 MARCH

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The West Interfers in Belarus & Ukraine

Christian Peacemakers 'Rescued' in Iraq: And They Didn't Even Say "Thanks"!

Bush Pledges Allegiance to Israel