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

Losing your capital is like losing your trousers. It is a real humiliation, and one not to be soon repeated.

Saudi Arabia is a puritanical state that claims a monopoly of wisdom and virtue.

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

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 invasion of Egypt and the creeping British annexation of Muslim India, that decline took on a malign aspect.

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 squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.

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 average. The large western oil companies, which cartellised the industry for much of the 20th century, are now selling more oil than they find, and are thus in the throes of liquidation.