No one can know the future, least of all, a historian, whose business is the past.
Machiavelli asks whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? He answers that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much saf...
Lo que de verdad llevó a Estados Unidos a Oriente Próximo en los años cincuenta no fue Israel o el petróleo, sino el miedo a la Unión Soviética; para ser exactos, miedo de que los rusos pudieran sacar...
Lo más desconcertante, sin embargo, fue el fracaso de Estados Unidos en lograr una intervención exitosa en Cuba, un país que era más cercano geográficamente, más prometedor en términos económicos y má...
Let’s face up to the question of who we support; let’s defend the bastards and reform them later.
Las tasas de desempleo en la mayoría de los países europeos son también marcadamente más altas que las de Estados Unidos, más del 10 por ciento en Bélgica y España, más de dos veces la tasa de Estados...
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 ayuda Marshall en sí misma no garantizaba la recuperación económica; de haber sido así, Gran Bretaña habría vivido un milagro económico, cuando en realidad le ocurrió lo contrario. Parece más plaus...
Japan. So successful was the Japanese ‘welfare superpower’ that by the 1970s life expectancy in Japan had become the longest in the world. But that, combined with a falling birth rate, has produced th...
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...
In the early 1950s, Harold Macmillan declared that the choice facing the country was between ‘the slide into a shoddy and slushy Socialism (as a second-rate power), or the march to the third British E...
In 1940, under Churchill’s inspired, indomitable, incomparable leadership, the Empire had stood alone against the truly evil imperialism of Hitler. Even if it did not last for the thousand years that...
If the British wished to abolish the slave trade, they simply sent the navy. By 1840 no fewer than 425 slave ships had been intercepted by the Royal Navy off the West African coast and escorted to Sie...
Habsburgs,
For some readers, I dare say, the word ‘institution’ still conjures up a Victorian vision of lunatic asylums: poor old Niall, he’s in an institution now. That is not the kind of institution I mean. I...
For roughly thirty years, young people at Western schools and universities have been given the idea of a liberal education, without the substance of historical knowledge. They have been taught isolate...
En ambas economías el caos fiscal se aunaba con la inflación rampante, que en Alemania evocaba la hiperinflación de 1923.Y ¿no había sido Hitler el «hijo adoptivo de la inflación»?88
Consider this: the US economy created 2.4 million jobs in the three years beginning in June 2009. In the same period, 3.3 million Americans were awarded disabled worker benefits. The percentage of wor...
Como Keynes dijo una vez, cuando los hechos cambian uno debe cambiar de opinión.
Bonds, as we saw in Chapter 2, are no more than promises by governments to pay interest and ultimately repay principal over a specified period of time. Either through default or through currency depre...