Today is International Women’s Day, so what better way to mark the achievements of girls who grew up to be powerful women than by interviewing one of our own most prominent diplomats, Faye Belnis, the head of press and public diplomacy and spokeswoman at the British Embassy?

What the United Kingdom can offer to India that other countries cannot, says the new British High Commissioner to India James Bevan, is the English language.Britain is providing English language training to a million Indian teachers, a programme that will indirectly reach a third of India’s population.

As a senior researcher at the London-based Foreign Policy Centre from 2005 to 2007 I was involved in early exploratory discussions at the Foreign Office on the promotional or "public diplomacy" opportunities offered by the London 2012 Olympics.

In order for soft power to be effective, however, you need a foundation of trust between countries. This can be a problem with traditional forms of cultural diplomacy, which are often perceived as being merely vehicles for sweetening the appeal of government policy. If a country is perceived to be overly self-interested as it deploys soft power, its efforts will fall flat.

So imagine the surprise when a survey of the world’s leading soft powers comes up with, you guessed it, America in top slot. The survey was not done by some adjunct of the American policy establishment, either. It was published by Monocle, a book-sized, chunky magazine published in London and styling itself as a “briefing on global affairs, business, culture and design.”

Shinkai has been awarded best director by the Association of Media in Digital (AMD), yet he remains relatively unknown beyond dedicated anime circles.That began to change this past fall, when he toured the United States and Britain...

Over the past decade, governments have become increasingly aware of the importance of "soft" power ... as a complement to the "hard" power of traditional military and economic means of achieving foreign policy objectives. Today in Westminster Hall I will be debating how we can develop a foreign policy strategy that better integrates the different elements of hard and soft power.