Leonard Doyle

Leonard Doyle WASHINGTON, Dec. 3: Ms Condoleezza Rice is taking her farewell international tour, which this week included a stop at Buckingham Palace to dazzle guests with her piano skills. But for a woman who was once trumpeted as the most powerful in the world and destined for the presidency, her star is rapidly dimming. In a little over a month, Ms Rice will be slinking back to her old job at California's Stanford University, where an uncertain welcome awaits her.

Leonard Doyle

Leonard DoyleLONDON, Oct. 5: Along the Appalachian Trail, the 2000-mile ribbon of wilderness stretching from Vermont to Tennessee, the leaves are putting on their annual display of dazzling yellows, gold and vermilion. And like the autumn leaves politics turns quicker in Vermont than elsewhere in the USA.

Leonard Doyle WASHINGTON, Sept. 27: He almost never wrote about it but, for the last 20 years of his life, Ernest Hemingway made his home in the rugged Idaho mountain town of Ketchum in a 1950s-era house made of poured concrete and painted to make it look like wood. It was there, in the entrance hall, that he ended his life with a blast of a shotgun and that is what the house is mostly remembered for.Despite Hemingway's iconic status in America, however, every attempt to open the house to the public has been thwarted by the neighbours.Which may be just the way "Papa" Hemingway would have wanted things to turn out. Because, apart from one short story and a passing reference in For Whom the Bell Tolls, the only time he wrote about his Ketchum sanctuary was in private letters to friends where he exulted in the area's mountains, its solitude and abundant hunting opportunities. The house with its large picture windows and wrap-around deck looking out over Big Wood River and the surrounding mountains n is filled with his personal possessions.But lawsuits from neighbours living in nearby mansions have ensured that every attempt to open it up to the public failed.The same neighbours have suggested that the Nobel prize-winner's house be jacked up on blocks and carted off to another location, at their expense. Although he is most associated in the public's imagination with Cuba and Florida, rural Idaho was Hemingway's spiritual home.

Leonard Doyle