If young men have jobs - or the prospects of jobs - they are less likely to take up arms, they are less likely to join the resistance.

The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.

I can't imagine having a conversation about 'Celebrity Big Brother' in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.

The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.

When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.

For 500 years the West patented six killer applications that set it apart. The first to download them was Japan. Over the last century, one Asian country after another has downloaded these killer apps- competition, modern science, the rule of law and private property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. Those six things are the secret sauce of Western civilization.