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

For 50 years, nuclear power stations have produced three products which only a lunatic could want: bomb-explosive plutonium, lethal radioactive waste and electricity so dear it has to be heavily subsidised. They leave to future generations the task, and most of the cost, of making safe sites that have been polluted half-way to eternity.

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 Europe was wrenched from its normal purposes and converted into a machine for killing.

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.

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

The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.

Liberty in Islam is the liberty to be a Muslim, democracy likewise, individualism likewise.