Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.

Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine.

There are many things that matter much more than an editor's gender in shaping the direction of the leadership.

The understanding of Syria's devastating civil war has been distorted by the immense danger and difficulty of covering it.

The good thing about the IMF is there is no European politics involved.

A contract for the establishment of government, being nothing but a voluntary contract between individuals for their mutual benefit, differs, in nothing that is essential to its validity, from any other contract between man and man, or between nation and nation.

My government, you can be assured, will be less focused on personalities. It is about treating people with respect. I think complaining about the community not being able to see the wisdom of our ideas is the wrong approach.

Politics is my second passion, but as a historian, you have to be genuinely neutral. You have failed in your primary duty as a historian if you are one side or the other.