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

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

One of the admirable features of British novelists is that they have no scruple about setting their stories in foreign settings with wholly foreign personnel.

The world dominion of western thought, forms of organisation, technology and military force is not God-given, nor eternal, nor greatly appreciated by the rest of the world.

When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world.

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

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