Former President Barack Obama was just 55 years old when he left office after two terms in 2017, making him one of the youngest ex-presidents. While he still has decades to go before reaching Jimmy Carter's record of 43 years of post-presidential retirement, Obama's relatively young age means that barring illness or catastrophe he is likely to remain a figure in American politics and society for some time. He'll also have more time than most chief executives to build his fortune, something that many former presidents either chose to forego or failed at. Ulysses S. Grant, for example, was just 54 when he left office in 1877, and after a failed Mexican railroad gambit and a massive investment in his son Buck's doomed Wall Street brokerage firm, he died virtually penniless.

That is a fate unlikely to befall Obama. Today he is a relatively youthful 64, and has packed a number of ventures into his early retirement years while still emerging periodically to stump for Democratic congressional and presidential candidates, which the party considers an asset given his status as the most popular living former president. He has also launched a film production company with former First Lady Michelle Obama and helmed the non-profit Obama Foundation, which manages the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. Finally, he and Michelle have published multiple best-selling volumes of their memoirs and appeared as well-compensated speakers at various events around the world, adding considerably to their net worth.

Like all presidents, Obama drew a salary during his time in office that made him a higher earner than 97% of all Americans. His family wealth today, however, is largely derived from royalties and advances from books, speaker fees from public engagements, deals for the couple's production company and real estate holdings. In 2018, the New York Post claimed that the Obamas were worth $135 million, although no methodology was shared with readers. Forbes estimated the Obamas' net worth in September 2024 to be $70 million. That remains the most recent public estimate.

How he made his fortune

22 years ago, Barack Obama, a Harvard Law graduate and University of Chicago law professor, was a little-known Illinois state senator when he was given the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston that nominated then-Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) for the presidency against incumbent George W. Bush. Obama's speech was so well-received that "observers from across the political world hailed the address as an instant classic," a career-altering turn that "captured the nation's attention and opened the way for a run at the presidency," said Chicago Magazine. It was "one of the most electrifying speeches in political convention history," said Politico, although its "aspirational message" now looks like an "almost hopelessly naive relic." Unfortunately for Democrats, it did not help Kerry capture the presidency. That address also propelled sales of Obama's little-known 1995 first book, "Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance," which had been re-published a month before the convention. "At a young age and without much experience as a writer, Barack Obama has bravely tackled the complexities of his remarkable upbringing," said The New York Times after the book's 1995 publication. Sales of the book subsequently "took off," and it "sold about 500,000 copies in the United States" in the two years after his breakthrough speech, said The Century Foundation.

Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004, and on the strength of his star turn at the DNC was already a national figure. By then, Obama had made millions from his two memoirs, including "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream" (2006) before he was elected president in 2008. He also wrote a children's book, "Of Thee I Sing: Letters to My Daughters," which was published in 2010. In 2007 alone, when he announced his longshot 2008 bid for the White House, Obama "earned almost $3.3 million from Random House book royalties," said AOL.

As a senator from Illinois, Obama started at a salary of $162,100 in 2006 and then earned $169,300 in his final year in the chamber in 2009 before collecting $400,000 per year during his eight years as the president. But it was the ongoing sales of his books that sent the Obamas' wealth on a steady upward trajectory during his presidency, with total royalties of $15.6 million between 2009 and 2017. Obama "donated all post-tax profits from the children's book to provide scholarships for children of wounded and fallen soldiers," said Forbes. Fortune estimated the Obamas' net worth to be $12.2 million when they left the White House in January 2017.

Lucrative post-presidency

Throughout this political career, President Obama was as much a celebrity as he was an elected official. The Obamas have long exercised significant influence over popular reading habits by virtue of their book recommendations — and in the Trump era, this often serves as an excruciating reminder "that we used to have a thoughtful, curious, intelligent man leading this country," said Literary Hub. It is therefore not surprising, in retrospect, that entertainment has been central to Obama's activities after his presidency ended. In March 2017, the Obamas signed a joint $65 million deal with Penguin Random House for one memoir each that "appears to be bigger than any previous presidential book deal in history," said Vox. Michelle Obama's book, "Becoming," was published in 2018. It "employs the techniques of a novel more than those of a typical political memoir," resulting in a book that was "surprisingly candid, richly emotional and granularly detailed," said Vanity Fair. It "sold more copies than any other book published in the United States in 2018," said Penguin Random House.

Her 2022 book, "The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times," was also an instant bestseller. Its structure was such that each "chapter is a tool" individuals can use "to help keep yourself together," and the book's insights were "nuanced and never prescriptive," said The New York Times. It was the second-highest selling book of 2022, "​​selling nearly 734,000 copies" despite not being released until November, said Publishers Weekly. Barack Obama's memoir of his time in office, "A Promised Land," was published in 2020. It was "less a personal memoir than an unusual sort of history, one recounted by the man at the center of it," said The Washington Post. It sold almost three million copies in its first year and was the "top print title in 2020," the turbulent year that was "marred by a deadly pandemic and extraordinary political and racial strife," said Publisher's Weekly. He has been working on a second volume of that memoir, and the "new tome is nearing completion," said Deadline in September 2024. A release date has not yet been announced, and the former president has not provided an update on his progress since.

President Obama "reportedly earned $800,000 for two speeches and at least $2 million for three talks" in 2017 alone, said Yahoo Entertainment. Those fees drew widespread scrutiny, as he "immediately stepped into controversy over his post-White House buck-raking," said the Los Angeles Times. In 2018, the Obamas founded a production company, Higher Ground Productions, and signed an agreement for an undisclosed amount of money with the streaming service Netflix. That agreement gave the Obamas a "global platform in the Trump era, connecting them with an audience of more than 120 million Netflix subscribers in more than 190 countries," said NBC News. Some critics assailed the deal as being "more about name recognition than actual content," said The New York Times.

The company has produced scripted and unscripted television and movies, including the children's show "Waffles and Mochi" as well as the 2023 post-apocalyptic thriller "Leave the World Behind." Obama reportedly had a hands-on role in the adaptation of Rumaan Alam's 2020 novel about a family navigating a series of mysterious global events at their vacation rental, but the president's "input came after the story's script was formulated," said Forbes. The film has a "light, practically Spielbergian touch and sense of adventure," and during its runtime the "apocalypse felt fun," said Brianna Zigler at Paste Magazine. Because it didn't get a theatrical release, there is no traditional box office data for the movie.

In 2022, Higher Ground signed with Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which "signals further growth for their company," said Deadline. CAA is a "powerhouse talent agency" with a "star-studded" roster of "Hollywood actors and sports legends," including actor Meryl Streep and baseball star Shohei Ohtani, said CBS News. That same year, Higher Ground signed a deal with Amazon's Audible service that "includes multiple audio projects that will be distributed worldwide," said CNN.

Higher Ground also produces podcasts, including "IMO With Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson," which debuted in 2025 and replaced her previous program, "The Light Podcast." The new podcast is "marked by a very American tendency to mutual self-congratulation," whose guiding principle seems to be "to stick to banalities," said The Times. The amount of money that the Obamas make from Higher Ground is unknown.

Obama also won an Emmy for Outstanding Narration in 2022 for his voice work on the Netflix documentary series "Our Great National Parks." He won a second Emmy in 2023 for narrating "Working: What We Do All Day," and again in 2024 for another Netflix documentary, "Our Oceans," which is a "nature series you'll want to binge like all your other streaming favorites," said The Daily Beast.

The Obamas bought and moved into a home in Washington, D.C., for $8.1 million in 2017, and still maintain their residence in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago that they purchased in 2005. It remains a "secret how often the former first family stays" in their Chicago residence, but it is "often enough that the tree out front has been cicada-proofed," said Chicago Magazine. They also bought an estate on Martha's Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, in 2019 for $11.75 million. The home "sits in an area that is rich with natural and human history" and their purchase was the "first time that a former president has bought property on the Island," said the Vineyard Gazette.

Like many Americans with substantial investments, the Obamas' portfolio has likely fluctuated dramatically in the tumultuous months following President Trump's "Liberation Day" tariff announcements on April 2, 2025, but no details of where the market drama has left them are currently available from public sources. Following the initial tariff announcement, Obama predicted they would have a negative impact but maintained that "he is more concerned with what he described as the White House's infringement of rights," said CNN.

Ellen DeGeneres has led the tributes to dancer and DJ Stephen ‘tWitch’ Boss following his death at the age of 40.

Boss’s death was confirmed by his wife Allison Holker. She told People magazine that “he was the backbone of our family, the best husband and father, and an inspiration to his fans”.

The cause of death has been determined as a gunshot wound to the head, according to the Los Angeles Medical Examiner.

The Los Angeles Police Department told the BBC that officers from the West Valley Division had responded to an “ambulance death investigation” radio call at a motel on Ventura Boulevard on Tuesday. “There were no signs of foul play,” the broadcaster reported.

Boss “rose to fame” as a contestant on MTV’s The Wade Robson Project before becoming a runner-up on Star Search, said People. He later competed on So You Think You Can Dance and was a judge this year.

He was also the DJ and dance-in-residence on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which he joined in 2014, and was made an executive producer in 2020.

In a Twitter post yesterday, DeGeneres said she was “heartbroken” by his death. Boss was “pure love and light”, she wrote, adding: “He was my family, and I loved him with all my heart. I will miss him.”

Former US first lady Michelle Obama tweeted that her “heart goes out to his wife, Allison, and his three children during this difficult time”. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson wrote that Boss was a “great guy” and urged his family to “stay strong”.

Boss married Holker, a professional dancer, in 2013 and they hosted Disney’s Fairy Tale Weddings together. Holker told TMZ that her late husband had “lit up every room he stepped into” and “valued family, friends and community above all else and leading with love and light was everything to him”.

Being first lady of the United States is undoubtedly time-consuming but Jill Biden has made clear that she won’t be giving up her pre-existing responsibilities any time soon.

The teacher, grandmother and long-time cancer research advocate is in the UK with her president husband this week for the G7 summit in Cornwall and is also due to meet the Queen at Windsor Castle on Sunday. But despite her busy schedule as first lady, the doctor of education is continuing her professional career during her husband’s presidential term - a decision that has been met with both praise and criticism.

Speaking to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show in December, she expressed her “surprise” at a controversial article by Joseph Epstein in The Wall Street Journal advising her to “drop the ‘Dr’ before your name” and “settle for the larger thrill of living for the next four years in the best public housing in the world”.

That she has ignored this advice is unlikely to come as a surprise to those who followed her stint as second lady during Joe Biden’s vice-presidency, between 2009 and 2017.

While residing at the VP’s official residence, Number One Observatory Circle in Washington D.C, Jill carried on teaching as professor of writing at the city’s Northern Virginia Community College, a role that she still holds today. “Teaching is not what I do. It’s who I am,” she tweeted in August last year.

Lady of learning

Jill Biden, née Jacobs, was born in the New Jersey town of Hammonton on 3 June 1951, but spent her childhood in Willow Grove, a northern suburb of Philadelphia. The eldest of five daughters, she described herself as “that girl from Philly” - a label that “if you’re from Philadelphia”, you know means she’s “down-to-earth, but also tough”, Kelly Dittmar, a political science professor at New Jersey’s Rutgers University-Camden, told Vox.

The future first lady married her first husband, Bill Stevenson, in 1970 before going on to study at the University of Delaware. She graduated with a degree in English in 1975, the same year that she and Stevenson divorced.

After a stint as a high-school English teacher, she completed a master’s degree in education specialising in reading at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, and then a master’s of arts in English from the state’s Villanova University.

Following years working in community colleges, as well as a psychiatric hospital, she was also received a doctorate in educational leadership from the University of Delaware in 2007.

For better or for worse

The 44-year marriage between Joe and Jill “hasn’t always been a straightforward fairytale romance��, Vogue noted during the former’s stint as VP. His first wife, college sweetheart Neilia, and one-year-old daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident in 1972. His sons Beau and Hunter were also in the car but survived.

The future US leader met Jill three years later, according to the White House - although her first husband told the Daily Mail last year that he suspected she had cheated on him with Biden, with the alleged affair dating back to at least August 1974. Stevenson claimed that he and his then wife had first met Biden while working on his campaign for Senate in 1972.

But those claims have been refuted by multiple sources, who say the future White House residents first met in 1975 on a blind date set up by the president’s brother.

The couple married in 1977, although the then-senator had to propose five times before she accepted. Their daughter, Ashley, was born in 1981.

Tragedy struck in 2015, however, when Beau Biden died from brain cancer. The politician’s son had battled ill health for years, suffering a stroke in 2010 and undergoing surgery to remove a legion from his brain three years later, shortly before being diagnosed with cancer.

Reflecting on her marriage in her 2019 memoir Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself, Jill wrote that “we have had our hearts wrung and broken”, but added: “One thing in my life has stayed the same: Joe and I have always had each other.”

Triple challenge

During her time as second lady, Jill began “tackling a traditional trio” of causes comprising cancer prevention, the military and education, says Philadelphia Magazine.

Having established the Biden Breast Health Initiative in 1993 to educate girls about breast cancer, in 2016 she helped launch the Cancer Moonshot initiative, a national coalition of cancer researchers. The initiative has “yielded rapid progress in the understanding, detection, and treatment of cancer”, reports The Lancet, which is joining calls for the now president to launch Moonshot 2.0 in order to “expand and amplify this progress”.

The first lady has also authored a children’s book, Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops, which was published in 2012 and encourages support of people serving in the military and their families.

And the seasoned educator has long championed the role of community colleges in America’s education system. She hosted the first White House Summit on Community Colleges during Barack Obama’s presidency, and as honorary chair of the College Promise National Advisory Board, advocated for making the first two years of college “as free and universal as high school”.

Taking centre stage

As well as continuing her work for the causes she took up as second lady, along with her teaching job, Jill has spent her first few months as first lady visiting Covid-19 vaccination clinics and healthcare centres across the US, to support for the country’s healthcare workers.

She is also facing calls to help stamp out the Trumps’ legacy in the White House, with more than 79,000 people signing a petition asking her and second gentleman Doug Emhoff to “restore” the famous Rose Garden to its former pre-Melania design.

All the same, as a familiar face in US politics, Jill “hasn't received an overwhelming amount of media attention in the same way some of her predecessors did”, says USA Today.

But “compared to previous first ladies, she’s off to a fast start” , historian Myra Gutin, a professor at New Jersey’s Rider University, told the newspaper. “This is not Jill Biden’s first rodeo - she really does know what goes on at the White House because she had a front-row seat to the first lady's role.”

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Frances Ryan in The Guardian

on Britain’s two-tiered approach to schools

The real problem is that England’s education system rewards the rich

“In the year before the pandemic, the Sutton Trust found independent school pupils were seven times more likely to gain a place at Oxford or Cambridge than those in non-selective state schools, and more than twice as likely to take a place at Russell Group institutions. In 2018, another study found almost half of ‘clever but disadvantaged’ students failed to secure top GCSE grades. Just 52% of the disadvantaged high achievers at primary school gained at least five A* and A grades in England, compared with 72% of their wealthier, equally clever, peers. Far from being wrong, the infamous algorithm in many ways succeeded in replicating the socio-economic bias that has plagued the education system for centuries. Or to put it another way: the educational inequality laid bare by the government’s incompetence is not a shock. It is business as usual.”

2. Stephen Bush in The Times

on flawed data and a lack of clarity

Algorithms are here to stay but ministers must understand them

“The mess that both [Scotland and England’s] governments have found themselves in is down in part to an old saying from the world of finance: garbage in, garbage out. Your algorithm is only as good as the information you feed into it and, because in both England and Scotland students now only sit standardised tests at 16 and 18, reliable data to allow the exams watchdog to distinguish accurately between students is in short supply. The watchdog instead had to set results using information about previous years. This is a lot like trying to replicate the delayed Tokyo Olympics by putting in the results of the Beijing, London and Rio contests into a computer... Why should one British athlete’s 2008 stumble bring another down in 2020? That’s part of what makes people so angry about this year’s results: the only people not to have directly shaped the destiny of this generation of school leavers are the children themselves.”

3. Alastair Campbell, former director of communications to Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, in The Independent

on a government in over its head

From exams to coronavirus, it’s clear our government is not up to the task – we should all be very angry

“It is hard to overstate, whether on competence or values, the difference between the [British and German] governments. But frankly, you could compare the UK government with any EU country and find that on virtually every aspect of the Covid-19 crisis, Johnson and his team of second-rate ministers (I am being generous) have handled it worse. He is not in the same league as a Merkel or a Macron. When Der Spiegel wrote recently about Johnson, they did so in a piece headlined, ‘The four leaders of the infected world’, referring to Trump, Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Johnson. That is the depth to which he and his populism have taken us. What Brexit and Covid-19 have shown, what the exams farce/fiasco/shambles is showing, is that government requires more than a propaganda factory spewing out three-word slogans.”

4. Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph

on civilised discussion

No Twitter mobs, just intelligent debate: the time is ripe for the return of After Dark

“Public discourse in Britain, as in much of what we call the ‘free world’, is in a pretty shocking state. This is partly because of steadily lower and more partisan standards of education, particularly in the humanities, which prevent people from learning how to argue rationally and in a civilised way. It is also partly because of social media, which operates a form of mob rule over those misguided enough to take it seriously, and in which a dictatorial consensus is imposed about what subjects are or are not fit for discussion – thus pre-judging the outcome of those discussions. But it is also because one of the most influential arms of the media, television, has long since run up the white flag on intelligent discussion programmes, in which the public were not only invited to watch thoughtful and intelligent people having thoughtful and intelligent conversations, but could perhaps learn some of the skills of discourse from watching them in action.”

5. Frank Bruni in The New York Times

on a vital US election

Michelle Obama Showed Us Why These Democrats Are Our Last Best Hope

“Never in my 55 years has the Democrats’ success mattered more for the welfare, the sanity — the future — of these United States than now, because never has the other fork in the road been a Republican president as profoundly amoral, fundamentally corrupt and flatly incompetent as the one seeking four more years. Donald Trump has made clear that he’s willing to steal this election from Joe Biden if that’s the only way to ‘win.’ He has in fact commenced that heist. He’s ready to smash all faith in our institutions and all pride in our democratic system and fashion a throne amid the wreckage. And he has a shockingly large number of accomplices — including, to date, most of the Republicans in Congress — who are cheering him on or biting their tongues to the point of hemorrhage. In the context of that, what I saw on Monday night wasn’t something to be parsed or graded. It was something to rush toward and relish: a buffet for the starving. It was salvation.”

Michelle Obama has urged the Duchess of Sussex to take her time adapting to her new life in the Royal Family - advice that the former first lady says is drawn from her own experiences in the White House.

Obama, currently promoting her bestselling memoir Becoming, shared her insider tips during an interview with Good Housekeeping.

The former first lady, who grew up in a lower-middle class household on Chicago’s South Side, empathises with Markle’s experience of being thrown into a high-profile role amid intense public scrutiny.

“Like me, Meghan probably never dreamt that she’d have a life like this, and the pressure you feel - from yourself and from others - can sometimes feel like a lot,” Obama said.

“So my biggest piece of advice would be to take some time and don’t be in a hurry to do anything.”

She described how she adjusted to her role as first lady, initially setting time aside to find her feet before embarking on her high-profile social campaigns.

“I spent the first few months in the White House mainly worrying about my daughters, making sure they were off to a good start at school and making new friends before I launched into any more ambitious work,” she said.

“I think it’s OK - it’s good, even - to do that.”

Both women share a common interest in advocating for female empowerment. Obama says she finds “great hope” in the younger generations of girls and women, and is encouraging the pregnant Duchess to stay true to her causes close to her heart.

“There’s so much opportunity to do good with a platform like that - and I think Meghan can maximise her impact for others, as well her own happiness, if she’s doing something that resonates with her personally,” she said.

The former actor’s first months in the Royal Family have been dogged by rumours of tensions with fellow royals, notably the Duchess of Cambridge.

Kate was reported to have been left in tears following a confrontation at a dress fitting for Princess Charlotte ahead of Meghan’s wedding to Prince Harry in May. On another occasion, the two women were said to have clashed over Meghan’s supposedly high-handed treatment of palace staff.

It has been suggested that the personality clash is the reason for Harry and Meghan’s decision to leave Kensington Palace, the residence they shared with William and Kate, and set up home at Frogmore Cottage in Windsor.

However, the Palace has dismissed reports of any feuds within the family. In a rare public statement, a spokesperson flatly denied the alleged spat over staff, saying: “This never happened.”

Former first lady Michelle Obama has revealed intimate details about her life in a newly published memoir.

The book, titled Becoming, covers the time before, during and after her husband Barack’s eight years as president. Here are five things we learned.

Why she will never forgive Trump

In an extract that she read to ABC News, the former first lady explains why she will never forgive Donald Trump for his hateful “birther” campaign against her husband in 2011, when Republicans questioned whether the then president was actually a US citizen.

“It was... dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks... Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him,” she writes.

A purposeful frown

Obama says she was unable and unwilling to put on a happy face at Trump’s inauguration, in January last year.

“I will always wonder about what led so many women, in particular, to reject an exceptionally qualified female candidate and instead choose a misogynist as their president,” she says. “I stopped even trying to smile.”

Coming into her identity

The first section of the memoir details her childhood growing up in a “cramped apartment on the South Side of Chicago”, with parents who pushed her to work hard and excel at school.

A dedicated student, Obama later attended the Princeton University, where she stood out on the Ivy League campus, reports the NPR news site.

The university had launched a diversity campaign and “the hope was that all of us would mingle in heterogeneous harmony”, Obama writes. However, she says, the burden was put on the minority students for that to work.

She faced further problems of stereotyping after her husband announced his run for president in 2007.

“I was female, black and strong, which to certain people ... translated only to ‘angry’. It was another damaging cliche, one that’s been forever used to sweep minority women to the perimeter of every room,” she says.

Doubts during campaign

The former first lady admits she was apprehensive about joining the 2008 campaign trail during her husband’s first presidential race, not least because of the stress it put on her family, according to The Guardian.

“I said yes because I believed that Barack could be a great president... I said yes because I loved him and had faith in what he could do,” she writes.

Being a ‘first’ First Lady

Obama was wary of becoming the first African-American first lady of the US, but says she was met with overwhelming support.

“I was ‘other’ almost by default. If there was a presumed grace assigned to my white predecessors, I knew it wasn’t likely to be the same for me,” she explains.

Yet outgoing first lady Laura Bush was quick to offer a hand of friendship, telling Obama that she was only a phone call away.

Recalling that time in Becoming, she says: “This was all heartening. I already looked forward to the day I could pass whatever wisdom I picked up to the next first lady in line.”

She offered to do exactly that for Melania Trump, but has yet to be taken up on the offer, Obama recently told ABC News.

Barack Obama is in talks with Netflix about producing a series of high-profile television shows.

The former US president and his wife, Michelle, are negotiating with the streaming service, which has nearly 118 million subscribers, sources told the New York Times.

Obama’s motivation is to highlight inspirational stories “rather than use the opportunity to hit back at political opponents and critics, including the Trump administration”, says TechCrunch.

The Netflix deal, “while not a direct answer to Fox News or Breitbart.com”, says the New York Times, would give Obama an unfiltered channel of communication with an audience “similar to the audiences he already reaches through social media, with 101 million Twitter followers and 55 million people who have liked his Facebook page”.

The number of episodes and format of the shows has yet to be decided but the streaming website has beat competitors such as Amazon and Apple to the former president's signature.

Obama’s senior adviser, Eric Schultz, told the New York Times: “President and Mrs Obama have always believed in the power of storytelling to inspire. Throughout their lives, they have lifted up stories of people whose efforts to make a difference are quietly changing the world for the better.

“As they consider their future personal plans, they continue to explore new ways to help others tell and share their stories.”

One possible show could see the former president “moderating conversations on topics that dominated his presidency, including healthcare and climate change”, says The Guardian.

“Another programme could feature the former first lady discussing topics such as nutrition, which she championed in the White House.”

Last year saw a string of new releases from literary giants such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Zadie Smith and Julian Barnes.

That’s not to mention a host of exciting new talent – and a political thriller from Bill Clinton.

Here are some of the best novels and non-fiction released in 2018.

Feel Free by Zadie Smith

A new Zadie Smith book is always accompanied by a fair amount of fanfare, but with Feel Free, the hype is well warranted.

With subjects ranging from Jay-Z and Quentin Tarantino to Facebook and Trump’s America, Smith’s “brilliant”, second collection of essays, “is at once delightful, challenging, and important”, says Esquire, “and might be the closest we’ll ever get to a real-life conversation with the fiercely private writer”.

Buy Feel Free from The Week Bookshop for £16

Educated by Tara Westover

Tara Westover, who grew up in a Mormon commune in Idaho, didn’t see the inside of a classroom until she was seventeen, but it was an experience that dramatically changed the trajectory of her life.

Voted the number one book of the year by Amazon book editors, who called it their “hands-down favourite”, Westover’s “stirring memoir chronicles how she survived her survivalist upbringing, eventually earning a PhD from Cambridge University” and is “a rousing reminder that knowledge is, indeed, power” says Business Insider.

Since its publication, it has gone on to win near-unanimous praise from readers and critics alike. The New Yorker called it “astounding” while Barack Obama described it as “remarkable”.

Buy Educated from The Week Bookshop for £12.99

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami

The celebrated Japanese author returns to the spotlight with the English translation of his latest novel; the story of a failing portrait painter whose life begins to change after a he discovers a mysterious painting referencing Mozart’s 18th-century opera Don Giovanni.

“As is often the case in Murakami’s fiction, a plot of relative simplicity – an artist’s reinvention – is disrupted by enigmatic, surreal or violent incidents” writes Charles Finch in The Independent.

While “he allows his disparate elements to spin out too widely, to the point where they begin to appear only tenuously connected” says The Guardian, “paradoxically, it’s this incompleteness that this beguiling, confounding – and yes, sometimes infuriating – novel is concerned with: the sense that everybody is unfinished, a work in progress, and that any clear-cut resolution is therefore a lie”.

Nominated for last year’s replacement for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and “written in a style that calls to mind The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, this is Murakami at his best”, says Vogue.

Buy Killing Commendatore from The Week Bookshop for £15.99

Becoming by Michelle Obama

First lady memoirs can often be turgid affairs but Michelle Obama is no normal first lady.

Charting her trailblazing path from Chicago’s South Side to the White House alongside her husband, “Becoming is frequently funny, sometimes indignant or enraged, and when Michelle describes her father’s early death from multiple sclerosis it turns rawly emotional,” says The Guardian.

Kuba Shand-Baptiste in The Independent says: “It’s both humbling and affirming to bear witness to the very human makings of Obama.”

At its most moving, it is “told with the style and warmth of a fireside tale”, says Vanity Fair, even if overall “her story is paced indifferently and regrettably”. The prose shifts between “bloodless, campaign-trail professionalism and the language of empowerment found on daytime talk shows”, says the magazine.

Her decision not to hold back on the current incumbent of the White House has broken with many accepted norms but her candour and insight into the ongoing American malaise has been widely welcomed and well received.

“With the full weight of Trump’s presidency on our shoulders, there’s something devilishly comforting about losing yourself in a book that so effortlessly pulls you out of today’s hellscape and thrusts you back to what, comparably at least, seem like the good old days,” says Shand-Baptiste.

Buy Becoming from The Week Bookshop for £25

Brave by Rose McGowen

The long-awaited memoir chronicling the life of actress and activist Rose McGowan, Brave tracks her childhood growing up in the Children of God cult and details her experiences with the Hollywood machine, including her alleged sexual assault by Harvey Weinstein.

“A must-read as the era of #metoo moves into a new year”, says Harper's Bazaar.

Buy Brave from The Week Bookshop for £17

The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers

A must for all coffee lovers, Eggers’s non-fiction tome tells the tale of Mokhtar Alkhanshali, the American son of Yemeni immigrant parents, who travels to Yemen to learn about the origins of coffee making.

Travelling deep in his ancestral homeland in order to resurrect the ancient art of Yemeni coffee, Alkhanshali finds himself caught up in the civil war, unable to abandon his people and give up his dream.

Buy The Monk of Mokha from The Week Bookshop for £16.99

Milkman by Anna Burns

Anna Burns’ Booker-Prize winning novel about the Northern Irish Troubles was the unanimous choice of the judges and has been widely hailed as a darkly comic masterpiece.

Told from the perspective of a 18 year-old girl with no interest in the conflict, Milkman is “viciously funny. Its jokes come out askew, as does its plot” says the Daily Telegraph.

Burns, who was shortlisted for the Orange prize in 2002 with No Bones, which also depicted the Troubles, “is excellent at evoking the strange ecosystem that emerges during protracted conflict”, agrees The Guardian.

The New Statesman says that “while Milkman is a work of timely universality, it is also a distinctly Irish novel, a darkly mirthful satire with a twist of Beckettian melancholy and an anarchic touch of Swift”.

Buy Milkman from The Week Bookshop for £6.99

Ctrl Alt Delete: How Politics and Media Crashed Our Democracy by Tom Baldwin

In his blistering book about how media and politics have been involved in a decade-long death spiral, journalist Tom Baldwin takes Apple’s first iPhone launch in 2007 as a kind of Year Zero moment.

The resulting explosion of social media, suggests Baldwin, destroyed the advertising revenue base of conventional media, created echo-chamber filter bubbles and laid people open to manipulation by shadowy forces.

Ctrl Alt Delete “is a well-written, often funny, sometimes elegiac and occasionally angry musing on how the worlds of politics and the media have been changed for the worse”, says David Aaronovitch in The Times.

Interviewing everyone from Tony Blair to Michael Gove, top journalists to Russian bloggers, and tech giant execs to online activists, “Baldwin describes a vicious battle for control of the news agenda, at the expense of public trust and the value of truth”, reports the Frontline Club.

While understandably focused on the Twitter age that spawned Brexit and Trump, “a merit of this book is that it takes care to explain that the crisis in the conduct of democracy did not happen overnight”, says The Guardian. “It is the culmination and interaction of trends reaching back at least three decades.”

Buy Ctrl Alt Delete from Amazon for £14.45

The Only Story by Julian Barnes

The Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending returns with a novel about a young man’s love for an older woman darkening into tragedy. Opening with the question, “Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less and suffer the less?" the book struggles to answer the question, exploring the possibilities of both.

Buy The Only Story from The Week Bookshop for £12.99

How to be famous by Caitlin Moran

The 1990s were recently voted the decade Britons would most want to go back to. In the era of Trump and Brexit it is understandable many people yearn for the sunny optimism of the end of the Cold War, Bill Clinton, New Labour and Britpop.

“Nostalgic or not, [Caitlin] Moran’s newest novel, the hilarious sequel to the soon-to-be adapted How to Build a Girl will transport you to grungy and gritty London during this time”, says Esquire.

Seen through the eyes of witty and wilful Wolverhampton-native Johanna Morrigan, Moran’s protagonist transforms herself into a self-styled music journalist whose unapologetic writing (and sex life) ends up catapulting her to fame with explosive consequences.

Buy How to Be famous from Amazon from £9.99

A long way from Home by Peter Carey

The double Booker prize-winning author returns to the remote country towns of his youth in a novel which touches upon his complicated relationship with race as a white Australian for the first time.

Set in the 1950s, the novel follows Irene Bobs and her husband as they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal motor race around the Australian outback, “over roads no car will ever quite survive”.

“I couldn’t have imagined that a car race could be so enthralling,” says the Guardian’s Tessa Hadley.

Buy A Long Way From Home from The Week Bookshop for £7.99

Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala

The second novel from the author of Beasts of No Nation (adapted into an award-winning Netflix film), Speak No Evil covers strikingly different ground to its predecessor.

Harvard-educated Iweala starts his follow-up novel far closer to home with a Harvard-bound hero from a well-off Nigerian family. But after young Niru is inadvertently outed to his profoundly homophobic parents by his white friend Meredith, the novel “veers into the dark unknown” as his life becomes “a journey of confusion, torment and, eventually, violence”, says Vulture.

Buy Speak No Evil from The Week Bookshop for £16.99

The Melody by Jim Crace

Another bleak portrayal by the author of Harvest, The Melody is “a fable about grief, myth, music and persecution, in which a widowed musician inadvertently sparks a campaign of violence against the paupers scratching a living on the fringes of town”, says The Guardian. The story is tale about greed as much as it is grief, offering commentary on those who are feared and othered for the sake of profit.

Buy The Melody from The Week Bookshop for £13.99

How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

There were many authors analysing the current political crises of the West last year, but David Runciman takes the award for the most gloomy. Nevertheless he is among the most critically acclaimed.

Expanded from an article written in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s shock election victory, the driving force behind the Cambridge academic’s book are questions such as what happens when websites like Facebook use their data to sell us opinions that suit our prejudices?

Calling the book “provocative”, “fluent” and “typically counter-intuitive”, Prospect says Runciman “believes that as democracy has grown middle-aged it needs to be more responsive to people’s actual needs”.

“Otherwise darker, more atavistic, forces may prevail,” says the magazine.

Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer says: “I didn’t entirely subscribe to his rather gloomy thesis, but there is five-star food for thought in How Democracy Ends.”

Buy How Democracy Ends from Amazon from £8.99

The Favourite Sister by Jessica Knoll

Set to be one of the beach holiday books of the summer, the new thriller from the author of Luckiest Girl Alive “has a reality TV show as its setting, and a pair of sisters — who are definitely no Housewives — with a dark secret to get the action going” says Elle.

USA Today says that in The Favourite Sister, “Knoll mines the rich landscape of reality television and creates a binge-worthy beach read complete with the provocative twists and turns of a whodunit”.

TIME has even published an except for those who want to dip their toe in before diving.

Buy The Favourite Sister from Amazon for £14.75

Air Traffic: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America by Gregory Pardlo

Taking as a point of departure his father’s own role in the 1981 US air traffic controllers strike, which saw the newly-elected Ronald Reagan go head-head-to-head with the unions, Gregory Pardlo’s memoir is “a masterwork, blending personal and family history with a historicised critique on blackness and masculinity” says Vogue.

An epoch-defining confrontation comparable to Margaret Thatcher's battle with the miners a few years later, Pardio manages that rarest of things - to tell a personal memoir that is also an important story about modern America.

Buy Air Traffic from The Week Bookshop for £22.00

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

Twenty-five years on from the release of The English Patient, Booker Prize-winning writer Michael Ondaatje returns to familiar territory with a novel set in the aftermath of the Second World War.

A series of unexplained mysteries involving abductions, disappearances and intrigue begin in Blitz London and unravel over number of years.

Buy Warlight from The Week Bookshop for £13.99

The Neighbourhood by Mario Vargas Llosa

A bona fide literary giant, Peru’s most celebrated author and Nobel Laureate tackles political corruption, the hazards of extreme wealth and erotic intrigues in his latest novel. The story follows Enrique, a high-profile businessman who receives a visit from the editor of a notorious gossip magazine which unleashes a twisting tale of murder, affairs, wealth and corruption.

Buy The Neighbourhood from Amazon for £15.28

Identity by Francis Fukuyama

One of the world’s most respected and accessible big thinkers, Fukuyama’s Identity brings a fresh spin to the much-covered themes of populism, political Islam and the conflict between liberalism and white nationalism.

Buy Identity from Amazon for £16.99

Love is Blind by William Boyd

Part of the rockstar group of authors who burst onto the British literary scene in the early 1980s, William Boyd is one of those rare writers who precipitates a cultural event with every new book.

This historical travelogue-cum-romance which takes place in 19th century Scotland, France and Russia, follows in the vein of earlier successes such as Any Human Heart and Waiting for Sunrise.

Set in the late 1890s, it’s an international saga about love, music, missed opportunities and revenge.

“Yet there is also a sense of mischief and playfulness imbued into its narrative that takes the form of several elaborate homages to other books and stories,” says Alexander Larman in The Guardian.

In so doing, “Boyd has pulled off an audaciously cunning trick, a literary bait and switch that both delights and surprises” says Larman.

Anton Chekhov’s influence on this novel “is clear from the epigraph, which quotes Chekhov’s widow, to one of the novel’s final images”, says The Spectator. “One wonders, though, how mindful Boyd is of the great Russian writer’s urge to ‘flee the stereotype’ at all times”.

In short, says The Scotsman, Love is Blind is “the equivalent of a nice blended whisky rather than the fine malt that Boyd provided in, for instance Any Human Heart. It’s Boyd at less than full throttle, but that is still better and far more engaging than the work of most novelists”.

Love is Blind hardback is available to buy from The Week Bookshop for £18.99

The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer

Wolitzer “has always found a way to write engrossing, smart, and breezy books that also cut to the heart of the conundrum of living as a woman in the world”, says Vulture, and her latest book is no exception, focusing on the generational tensions among feminists at a fictional US college.

Buy The Female Persuasion from The Week Bookshop for £13.99

Room to Dream by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna

Fresh from near-universal praise for his Twin Peaks follow-up, visionary director David Lynch teams ups with Kristine McKenna to deliver a part memoir, part biography incorporating interviews with friends and contemporaries. Giving us an in-depth look into his creative process, Lynch reveals the inner story of the life behind the art.

Buy Room to Dream from The Week Bookshop for £22.00

The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

Political memoirs are ten-a-penny, but it is not so often a former US president turns his hand to fiction. Teaming up with prolific novelist James Patterson, Bill Clinton brings insider knowledge to this political thriller about the disappearance of a US president.

Buy The President is Missing from The Week Bookshop for £18.00

The Fruits of my Labour by Karl Ove Knausgaard

“The final volume in the epic Norwegian autobiographical series includes a long essay on Hitler and a consideration of the personal fallout from his earlier books,” says The Guardian. The borders between private and public worlds merge in this tell-all, as Knausgaard opens up about everything from his ambitions and frailties, his uncertainties and doubts and his relationships with friends and family.

Buy The Fruits of my Labour from Amazon for £19.49

21 lessons for the 21st century by Yuval Noah Harari

New books by Yuval Noah Harari have become something of an event.

Ever since Sapiens, his history of humanity, burst on to the literary scene in 2014 the book and its author have become a literary phenomenon. Selling over one million copies worldwide, it has been cited by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama as a must-read.

The future-gazing follow-up, Homo Deus, was also a global bestseller, and now Harari has turned his attention to the present with 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, covering everything from war to fake news to meditation.

The Guardian describes 21 Lessons as “a self-help guide for a bewildering age” whose “sweeping statements are peppered with truly mind-expanding observations”.

Some critics have claimed the book amounts to little more than a collection of already-published articles, but given Harari’s status as ‘guru of the moment’, there is little doubt it will still prove hugely popular amongst his legion of devoted fans.

Buy 21 lessons for the 21st century from Amazon for £9.96

The Secret Barrister by the Secret Barrister

A unique take on courtroom drama, The Secret Barrister holds the distinction of being written by an actual barrister, who chooses to withhold their name.

Cosmopolitan says the real-life stories detailed in the book straddle a fine line between “touching, telling and at times terrifying”, adding that the mystery author answers “questions you might’ve always wanted to ask: about wigs, about defending someone they suspect is guilty, and about holding the responsibility of someone’s future in your hands”.

The Guardian notes that the book, while funny and informative, also serves as a damning indictment of an “utterly broken” justice system.

Buy The Secret Barrister from The Week Bookshop for £16.99

Bring It On Home by Mark Blake

Subtitled Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin and Beyond: The Story of Rock’s Greatest Manager, Mark Blake’s rip-roaring Bring It On Home takes readers through the formation of Led Zeppelin, one of the world’s most iconic rock bands, and the story of their shrewd, mercurial manager Peter Grant.

“To say Bring It On Home is a rambunctious page-turner is an understatement; but despite all the violence and weirdness, you can’t help liking the ‘real’ Peter Grant who emerges here,” Planet Rock says of the book, which was published to coincide with the band’s 50th anniversary.

Buy Bring It On Home from Amazon for £13.65

Michelle Obama has wowed Twitter with her romantic Valentine’s Day gesture for Barack.

The former first couple’s open displays of affection after almost 25 years of marriage have long been a source of delight to their admirers - and on the traditional holiday of love, they did not disappoint.

Barack Obama marked the occasion with a cute Instagram picture of the pair on holiday. “You make every day and every place better,” he wrote alongside the snap.

So what songs made the cut?

The Obamas’ love for old-school soul and RnB is well-attested, so the inclusion of tracks by the likes of Ben E. King, Etta James, Stevie Wonder and Luther Vandross comes as no surprise.

More modern entries on the 44-track playlist include Halo by Beyonce, rapper Kendrick Lamar’s LOVE, The Shape of You by Ed Sheeran and Bruno Mars smoochfest Marry You.

Rod Stewart, Elton John, Coldplay and Mary J. Blige also make also make the list, which spans a wide umbrella of genres from hip-hop to easy listening.

Predictably, Michelle’s romantic mixtape had Twitter in a tizz:

Many observed that the Obamas’ lovey-dovey social media missives were a far cry from the current First Couple, who are rarely seen interacting in public:

While the less romantically-minded simply applauded Michelle’s taste in music:

Barack and Michelle Obama’s official portraits were unveiled this week at the Smithsonian National Portrait Museum in Washington DC, where they will hang along with portraits of every past US president.

Former US President Obama described his portrait by Kehinde Wiley - “known for his Old Master-style depiction of African-Americans,” says the BBC - as "pretty sharp"

The former first lady chose Amy Sherald, an artist from Baltimore known for painting life-size portraits of black Americans, to paint her portrait. Obama noted that she’s the first person in her family ever to have a portrait done, “let alone a painting that will be hanging in the national gallery.”

“Amy, I want to thank you for capturing the grace and beauty and intelligence and charm — and hotness — of the woman that I love,” he said at the unveiling.

The paintings are “intentionally unlike the more realistic portraits that have come before”, says The New York Times’s Holland Cotter. Wiley “depicts Obama not as a self-assured, standard-issue bureaucrat, but as an alert and troubled thinker”, he says, while Sherald's portrait of Michelle Obama “overemphasizes an element of couturial spectacle, but also projects a rock-solid cool”.

Wiley and Sherald are the first black painters to receive a presidential portrait commission from the museum, “a factor that seemed especially important to Michelle Obama,” says Vox.

“I’m also thinking of all the young people,” the former first lady said, “particularly girls and girls of color, who ... will see an image of someone who looks like them hanging on the wall of this great American institution. I know the kind of impact that will have on their lives, because I was one of those girls.”

On Twitter there was praise for the paintings, with many commenting on Kehinde’s unique depiction of the former president.

Some suggested that Michelle Obama’s portrait was unrealistic, while others came to the artist’s defence:

And, as ever, there were those who thought The Simpsons got there first:

The portraits will be on public display from today in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

Barack Obama proved that romance is still alive and well in the Obama household with a surprise video message for wife Michelle to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary.

The former first lady was being interviewed on stage by TV producer Shonda Rimes at the Pennsylvania Conference for Women in Philadelphia when the conversation turned towards the Obamas marriage milestone.

Rimes, creator of shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder, informed Obama that she had a surprise to mark the occasion.

That surprise turned out to be a video message recorded by her husband, a two-minute tribute to their quarter-century of marriage that brought tears to Michelle’s eyes.

“The idea that you would put up with me for a quarter of a century is a remarkable testament to what a saintly, wonderful, patient person you are,” Barack said in the clip, which has since been viewed on Facebook nearly six million times.

As well as being an “extraordinary partner” and “great friend”, Michelle had also served as “an example to our daughters and to the entire country”, the former president said.

“It’s no wonder that as people got to know you the way that I got to know you, they fell in love.”

Barack added that the “best decision” he ever made was “being persistent” in seeking a date with Michelle, in reference to their initial meeting in Chicago in 1989.

Then a new graduate of Harvard Law School, Obama spent a summer working at Chicago’s Sidley Austin law firm, where he immediately took a shine to his assigned mentor, Michelle Robinson.

However, the future first lady “initially turned down his advances, telling her brother she thought dating a colleague was ‘tacky’” according to the Daily Telegraph.

By the end of the summer, Michelle had relented. Their first date was a movie - Spike Lee drama Do The Right Thing - followed by ice cream, the New Yorker reports. Three years later, the couple got married at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Their first dance was to Stevie Wonder’s You and I. They have two daughters - Malia, born in 1998, and Sasha, born in 2001.

Barack Obama has announced that he is backing a new initiative to reduce the influence of gerrymandering in the US.

The former president launched Redistricting U, a free training initiative to give volunteers the tools needed to impact redistricting in their state and make the process fairer, says CNN.

Redistricting is the process of drawing lines between electoral district boundaries in the US, similar to redrawing House of Commons constituency boundaries in the UK. Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing these lines in ways which advantage one party over another.

Obama said in a statement: “The movement for fair maps will determine the course of progress on every issue we care about for the next decade.

“And we can’t wait to begin organising when the redistricting process starts in 2021. We need to build this movement from the ground up – right now.”

The announcement represents a rare political intervention from Obama, who has kept a relatively low profile since Donald Trump took office, making only occasional public appearances and comments.

Since leaving the White House, he and wife Michelle, who still live in Washington D.C., have popped up in some unexpected places. Last year, the former president attended the annual Nelson Mandela Lecture in Johannesburg, South Africa, to deliver what he described as his “most important” speech since leaving the White House in January 2017.

Along with the odd public engagements, the couple have also signed book deals believed to total more than £30m. The former first lady’s memoir, Becoming, smashed sales records after being published in November 2018.

No date has been scheduled yet for the release of the eagerly anticipated memoir by her husband, who wrote two books before becoming president, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. But the New York Post reports that updates from publisher Penguin Random House suggests it may land during the 2020 presidential campaign.

The Obamas have indicated that they intend to donate a “significant portion” of the proceeds from their memoirs to charity, adds The Independent.

Earlier this year, it was revealed that they have also signed a contract with streaming service Spotify to produce a series of podcasts.

Variety reports that the couple are “set to develop, produce, and lend their voices to select podcasts on a wide range of topics” in a multiyear deal between their company Higher Ground Productions and the audio streaming platform.

“We’ve always believed in the value of entertaining, thought-provoking conversation,” the former president said in a statement. “It helps us build connections with each other and open ourselves up to new ideas... Podcasts offer an extraordinary opportunity to foster productive dialogue, make people smile and make people think, and, hopefully, bring us all a little closer together.”

The Obamas have a deal with Netflix as well, “to produce original scripted, unscripted and documentary series and films”, the entertainment news site adds.

First Lady Michelle Obama "stole the show" during a testing first night at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, delivering an evocative and deeply personal speech in support of her party's nominee for US president, Hillary Clinton.

"We need to pour every last ounce of our passion and our strength and our love for this country into electing Hillary Clinton as president of the United States of America," Obama said.

"In this election, we cannot sit back and hope that everything works out for the best... Between now and November, we need to do what we did eight years ago and four years ago."

The former US secretary of state has the "grace and the guts to keep coming back and put cracks in that highest and hardest glass ceiling until she finally breaks through, lifting all of us with her", the First Lady told the packed arena, referring to Clinton's concession speech to Barack Obama, eight years before.

Obama said it was the "story of this country" that brought her to the stage - the story of "generations of people who have felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation but who kept on striving and doing what needed to be done".

It was "because of Hillary Clinton" that her "daughters and all our sons and daughters, now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States", she added, her voice bristling with emotion.

"So don’t let anyone ever tell you this country isn’t great, that somehow we need to make it great again because this right now is the greatest country on earth," Obama concluded, with an elegant inversion of the Trump campaign message that brought the convention audience to their feet.

The First Lady's speech was universally acclaimed, with The Guardian reporting that some delegates were moved to tears.

Others highlighted her skill in rebuking the Trump message without once mentioning the Republican nominee by name.

"Obama wasn’t there to rally the base. She didn’t even need to mention Trump's name. Her goal was much bigger: she was there to claim the mantle of unifying American values," said Vox's Libby Nelson. "She positioned herself and Hillary Clinton in the mainstream and Trump far outside it."

Gail Collins in the New York Times agreed, saying: "Michelle Obama stole the show. The Obama speech marked the moment where the Democratic convention turned around."

ADELE HAS agreed to join Beyonce and perform at Michelle Obama's 50th birthday party at the White House next year.

After picking up an Oscar for her performance of the James Bond theme Skyfall, the British singer's "incredible US journey" has continued with an invitation to sing at the First Lady's soiree in Washington DC on 17 January, reports the Mail on Sunday. Beyonce had already agreed to perform at the event, which is described as a "huge, celebrity-packed party" by the Daily Express.

A source told the paper that Adele has "graciously accepted" Obama's invitation and waived her usual fee for a "high-profile private performance". The Obamas will be picking up the 24-year-old singer's expenses because the party is a private, not a State event.

The Express says Adele has another reason to head back to the US: her new best friend, Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence. The two women "struck up a friendship" at the Oscars and have been "hanging around together", a source said. Lawrence is scheduled to come to London later this year to make an X-Men movie and Adele has recommended she stays in London's exclusive Notting Hill, where the singer owns a house.

Adele has become a star in the US thanks to the success of her album 21. In January, it was revealed that the record had become the US's biggest-selling album for the second year in a row.

Beyonce has a long-standing relationship with the Obamas. The singer performed at President Obama's inauguration earlier this year, sparking controversy when it was revealed that she lip-synched to a backing tape. Both Beyonce and her husband, Jay-Z, backed Obama when he first ran for president and when he campaigned to be re-elected.

There really isn't anywhere else for a young charismatic Democrat president to go for his summer holiday. Like Kennedy and Clinton, Barack Obama is expected spend a good part of August in the peaceful seclusion of Martha's Vineyard, the island off Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Obama went to Martha's Vineyard two years ago, and enthused at a fundraiser that it was "one of those magical places where people of all different walks of life come together. Where they take each other at face value."

He added: "I can wander around in shorts and not shave in the morning and no one talks about it." Now, there are reports that the President has sent his entourage ahead to scout out a suitable family holiday home, while some hotel owners say the Secret Service has been booking rooms. The big question is whether Obama will head to the part of the island favoured by the ex-Presidents and an array of Hollywood royalty, or whether he'll stay in the area to the northeast of the island favoured by America's black elite. The former, labelled Hollywood East, plays host to the Kennedy clan, Sir Paul McCartney, Carly Simon and many other stars. The latter, centred around Oak Bluffs and a beach called the Ink Well, is where Oprah Winfrey, Spike Lee and many other rich black Americans hang out. Lawrence Otis Graham, an acclaimed black author, said that the community there would be doing whatever they could to be seen with Obama. "The Obamas provide the international imprimatur which the black elite craves", he said.

But the social scene was an exclusive one, he noted: "They are very elitist and unapologetic about it. They are not interested in celebrities or entertainment and sports figures. They want to know where your great-grandfather went to medical school, and the school your grandmother went to before she 'came out' as a black debutante, and who presented her." The island's reputation as a summer colony for rich liberals once led George W Bush, who preferred to holiday at his own ranch in Texas, to deride its inhabitants as elitist white wine swillers. In 1996, on the advice of his pollster Dick Morris, Bill Clinton swapped his annual, sociable jaunt there for a hiking trip to Wyoming, to convince the American electorate that he too loved the great outdoors. The holiday was a disaster.