If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility.

When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers.

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

American Empire- it is an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions which need them most urgently and which, if they are neglected, will breed the greatest threats to its security. It is an empire, in short, that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial.

To make a living space, there first had to be a killing space.

The Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone began as a racist utopia and ended as a cross between an abbatoir, a plantation and a brothel.

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