Viewed from a distance, or through the eye of the All-Knowing CEO of the Universe, the crash of 2008 followed the usual pattern. A long-lived boom dr….

Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business ….

A century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity; today it is almost as vital to human existence as water..

Were there peace and justice in the Middle East, the Arabs would no more need their tinhorn dictators than they would their corpulent princes..

Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history; and never more so than today, where entire classes of securi….

All UK nuclear power stations should be shut down without delay..

Europe and North America, we are told, are less dependent on energy-intensive heavy industry than in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems we squeeze more GD….

Because bankers measure their self-worth in money, and pay themselves a lot of it, they think they're fine fellows and don't need to explain themselv….

One of the consequences of the Iranian revolution has been an explosion of history. A country once known only from British consular reports and intre….

Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science - steam carriages, zeppelins, armoured trains - none has been so catastrophic ….

The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free p….

Even before he came to power in 1997, Gordon Brown promised to change the accounts to parliament from simple litanies of cash in and cash out, to a m….

Soaring prices for crude oil, falling production surpluses, wild speculation in commodities, a rush into the precious metals, turmoil in the Middle E….

The prevailing ideology of the modern west - which is political economy - is in the doghouse. Having failed to notice atmospheric pollution, the econ….

If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside..

Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop..

For all their current prestige, Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers are still regarded in all but the most desperate districts of Gaza or Peshawa….

To make a love story, you need a couple of young people, but to reflect on the nature of love, you're better off with old ones. That is a fact of lif….

Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born revolutionary who is believed by most Arab and Iranian observers to be the inspiration of the attacks in New York and….

It is time to end the western policy of malign neglect. It is in the interest of the whole world to help tackle the actual grievances in Palestine, K….

The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce, fir….