In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a result of forced resettlement.

Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared?

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

In the old days it would have been a relatively simple matter to have checked Hitler's territorial ambitions. All you'd have needed would have been the 1914 combination of Britain, France and Russia. Indeed, if such an alliance had acted decisively to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938, Hitler might even have been overthrown by his own military. But it was not to be.

It’s our generation that is witnessing the end of Western predominance. The average American used to be more than 20 times richer than the average Chinese. Now it’s just five times, and soon it will be 2.5 times.

It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.

In the financial sector, those whom the gods want to destroy they first teach math.