Saudi Arabia operates according to the belief that God made young men and women so utterly and completely without self-control that they must be phys….

When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassio….

Any new financial order for the world must tackle the three chief challenges of our age..

Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe a….

We generally write best of what we ourselves have seen..

The dividing line between wish and need was never clear..

Since the attack on the United States on September 11 2001, and the US retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, there must be few people who have not fel….

Whatever else it was, Adolf Hitler's short-lived regime was also a colossal industrial process by which the wealth and productive power of much of Eu….

Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbl….

By pouring money and goods into devastated regions, foreign aid workers sometimes compound the disruption and debauch the survivors..

The world survived the fall of the Roman empire and will no doubt outlast our own so much more splendid civilisation..

For 50 years, nuclear power stations have produced three products which only a lunatic could want: bomb-explosive plutonium, lethal radioactive waste….

There are signs that the age of petroleum has passed its zenith. Adjusted for inflation, a barrel of crude oil now sells for three times its long-run….

Economists, like royal children, are not punished for their errors..

Profits in business always depend on the rate of interest: the higher the interest, the higher the rate of profit required..

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-….

The aircraft that blew up the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington conveyed several messages to the world, of which one of t….

Ever since the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, the Muslim world has been in slow decline relative to the west. With Napoleon's invasio….

Life without oil, in fact, would be so different that it is frightening to contemplate. We are addicted, and it is no comfortable addiction..

To give money to a woman - and here I must speak as a man - is to deny her special quality, her irreplaceability, and reduce her unique amiability to….

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….