These days, nearly everyone claims to be democratic. I have even heard it claimed that the Chinese Communist Party is democratic. ‘Capitalist’, by contrast, is a word too often used as a term of abuse...
There are two disadvantages to this political fragmentation. Small countries are often formed as a result of civil war within an earlier multi-ethnic polity – the most common form of conflict since 19...
The torrent of verbiage comes about because professional politicians are more concerned with spin than substance, the media never cease to howl for ‘something’ to be done after every mishap, the lobby...
The thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely creatures. . . . The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, mos...
The spirit of policy and that of bureaucracy are diametrically opposed,
The first ‘networked era’ followed the introduction of the printing press to Europe in the late fifteenth century and lasted until the end of the eighteenth century. The second –our own time –dates fr...
The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril
The Kissingers descended from Meyer Löb (1767–1838), a Jewish teacher from Kleineibstadt who in 1817 took his surname from his adopted home of Bad Kissingen (complying with an 1813 Bavarian edict that...
The Four Black Boxes To demonstrate that Western institutions have indeed degenerated, I am going to have to open up some long-sealed black boxes. The first is the one labelled ‘democracy’. The second...
The English language is the one thing the Commonwealth still has in common.
The British had built railways across their Empire with the labour of Asian ‘coolies’. Now, in one of the great symbolic reversals of world history, the Japanese forced 60,000 British and Australian P...
The Bolshevik newspaper Krasnaya Gazeta declared: ‘Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood....
Stalin’s power consisted of three distinct elements: total control of the party bureaucracy, total control of the means of communication – with the Kremlin telephone network as the central hub – and t...
Soros regards himself as more a philosopher than a hit man. His book The Alchemy of Finance (1987) begins with a bold critique of the fundamental assumptions of economics as a subject,
Sería más acertado hablar de «nihilismo islámico», o quizá «bolchevismo islámico», pues no debemos olvidar que en sus primeros años Lenin y Stalin fueron también terroristas. En
Me estremezco al pensar en cuál ha de ser el resultado de una lucha entre sistemas tan distintos; uno de nosotros ha de prevalecer y el otro será destruido, en cualquier caso no podemos existir ambos...
La carrera de Morgan ilustra perfectamente el modo como se construyó el imperio, que consistió en la transición de la piratería al poder político, hecho que cambiaría el mundo para siempre.
La Unión Soviética, a diferencia de anteriores aspirantes a la hegemonía, está animada por una nueva fe fanática, antitética a la nuestra, y busca imponer su autoridad absoluta sobre el resto del mund...
Known to the Chinese as ‘Iron-Headed Old Rat
It is hard to believe that Gladstone would have ordered the invasion of Egypt in 1882 if the Egyptian government had not threatened to renege on its obligations to European bondholders, himself among...