Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

Посвящается моим дорогим девочкам: жене Марине и доч­кам Даше, Ксюше и Маше

Сергей Кузнецов

Speak and Write like The Economist

Говори и пиши как E^nomist

2-е издание, дополненное и переработанное

Q

альпина

ПАБЛИШЕР

Москва 2018

УДК 811.111-26 ББК 81.2Англ-5 К89

Редактор В. Ионов

Кузнецов С.

К89 Speak and Write like The Economist: Говори и пиши как The Eoonomist / Сергей Кузнецов. — 2-е изд., доп. и перераб. — М.: Альпина Паблишер, 2018. — 570 с.

ISBN 978-5-9614-6522-8

В этой книге собраны лучшие образцы утонченного английского язы­ка, которые позволят читателю блеснуть полученными знаниями в самом высокообразованном обществе. Автор предлагает результаты десятилет­ней кропотливой работы с наиболее авторитетным деловым еженедель­ником на английском языке — журналом The Economist.

Полезная и увлекательная книга предназначена для тех, кто готов оставить рутину, уделить время тонкостям живого языка и неожи­данно для себя и окружающих начать думать, говорить и писать как The Economist.

ISBN 978-5-9614-6522-8

УДК 811.111-26 ББК 81.2Англ-5

Все права защищены. Никакая часть этой книги не может быть воспроизведена в какой бы то ни было форме, и какими бы то ни было средствами, включая раз­мещение в сети интернет и в корпора­тивных сетях, а также запись в память ЭВМ, для частного и.пи публичного ис­пользования, без письменного разрешения владельца авторских прав. По вопросу ор­ганизации доступа к электронной библио­теке, издате,льства обращайтесь по адресу mylib@alpina.ru

© Кузнецов С., 2017 © ООО «Интеллектуальная Литерату­ра», 2018

Содержание

От автора 7

Предисловие 8

Сокращения 10

ЧаСТЬ 1 11

Age, health, life, death, soul 11

Art, books, music, Hollywood, education, media 19

Business, money, trade, economics, professions 28

Food, wine, fun, joy, pleasure, luck, beauty, happiness 57

Government, politics, democracy, society 67

Law, justice, rules 87

Love, marriage, family, sex, friendship, children 90

Nature 102

Philosophy, religion, thinking, wisdom, languages,

truth, morality 118

Science, technology, progress, history, civilization 128

War, violence, terrorism, spying, diplomacy, crime, hunting 143

Russia, USSR, mysterious Russian soul, communism, vodka, fatalism 159

ЧаСТЬ II 166

От автора

Как я и обещал читателям первого издания моей книги, предлагаю на их суд значительно расширенный и углубленный вариант.

На сей раз в книгу вошли многочисленные цитаты из тысяч ста­тей, опубликованных в журнале The Economist за последнее деся­тилетие. Как правило, за одной цитатой стоит десяток публикаций, в разное время появлявшихся на страницах журнала, осмысление которых потребовало от меня поистине напряженных усилий. В сво­бодное от семейных забот и работы время.

Предлагаемый запас слов по-прежнему напоминает «лингви­стический детектив», как метко подметил один из моих читателей. Детективный сюжет стал, поверьте мне, еще более интригующим и захватывающим.

Тем же, кто предпочитает не спеша поразмышлять на досуге о смысле жизни, философии, религии, науке, человеческих отноше­ниях, мироздании, любви и счастье, непременно придется по вкусу высококонцентрированная мудрость неутомимых авторов журна­ла The Economist.

Одним словом, хочу искренне верить, что чтение этого труда до­ставит читателям истинное удовольствие и поможет подняться на еще один, более высокий, уровень познания этого бесконечного мира. А я между тем обещаю работать не покладая рук над следующим изданием.

До новых встреч, Сергей Кузнецов

Предисловие

Читал "Century". Отметил, что выпи­сать. Если бы делать выписки, состави­лись бы те книги, которые нужны.

Л. Н. Толстой, 26 ноября, 1888 г.

Я думаю, что если бы мне прожить еще сорок лет и во все эти сорок лет читать, читать и читать и учиться писать та­лантливо, т.е. коротко, то через сорок лет я выпалил бы во всех вас из такой большой пушки, что задрожали бы не­беса. Теперь же я такой лилипут, как и все.

А. П. Чехов, 3 августа 1899 г.

В нашей книге любознательный читатель узнает много новых забав­ных, удивительных и полезных фактов, среди которых будут, к при­меру, ответы на следующие вопросы:

Универсальный и эффективный рецепт, как дожить до 120 лет.

Для чего бог любви Эрос всегда имел при себе наготове два вида наконечников для стрел?

Комбинация из девяти самых ужасных слов в английском языке.

Почему Достоевский хотел, чтобы американцы жили в Рос­сии вдоль реки Амур?

Как в Германии отапливают дома железнодорожными рельсами?

Почему в звездную ночь навозные жуки быстрее уносят свою драгоценную добычу?

Сколько сотен тонн золота можно хранить на крошечной кух­не в «хрущобе»?

Какое существо в живой природе до сих пор носит имя Гит­лера?

Как гарантированно избежать нежелательной беременности?

Сколько миллионов лет тратит человечество в месяц на раз­говоры по телефону?

Из чего любил готовить пироги Титус Андроникус?

Как можно было успешно решить свои житейские проблемы в Голландии за горстку семян тюльпанов в XVII в.?

Что оставил в качестве завещания человечеству в 90 баночках итальянский художник Пьеро Манзони? Сколько раз надо опустить под воду голову подозреваемого, чтобы тот окончательно и бесповоротно сознался в участии в террористических актах?

Что советовал Наполеон делать с растущей мощью Китая? Как ракообразные повышали урожайность сельского хозяй­ства в средние века?

Формула из четырех главных элементов распространения па­ники в любом государстве.

Что надо ученому Крейгу Вентору, чтобы бросить вызов Богу и создать новое живое существо? Как проходят самые престижные похороны в Гане? Что Юлий Цезарь держал во рту во время заплывов на 300 мет­ров?

Сколько зиттабитов информации можно записать на одну молекулу ДНК?

Какие микроорганизмы путешествовали в 135-метровом ков­чеге Ноя?

Когда Женева была разрушена мощным цунами? Три основных составляющих элементов американской мечты. Как Боб и Элис скрывают от Евы закодированные послания? Сколько верблюдов и кошек потеряли англичане в войне в Аф­ганистане в 1842 г.?

Какой вклад внес Наполеон в технологию консервирования продуктов?

Была ли жена у Иисуса? И многое-многое другое.

Загадочная русская душа и особенная стать России вынесены в отдельный раздел.

Фразеология первой части содержит много слов, которые объясня­ются во второй части:

Opprobrium

Ostentatiously

Roadkill

Scoff

Sneer

Schmaltzy

Swaggering

Timorous

Unravelling

Untangling

Actuary Blunted Catechise Hairy

Fortuitously

Gullibility

Hanky-panky

Hubris

Minnow

Munching

Сокращения

Русские

ант. — антоним

букв. — буквально

в. — век вв. — века

г. — год

греч. — греческий (язык)

др. — другой, другие

др.-греч. — древнегреческий язык

им. — имени

каких-л. — каких-либо

какого-л. — какого-либо

какое-л. — какое-либо

какой-л. — какой-либо

каком-л. — каком-либо

кем-л. — кем-либо

кого-л. — кого-либо

кому-л. — кому-либо

н.э. — наша эра

напр. — например

обыкн. — обыкновенно

оскорбит. — оскорбительное

особ. — особенно

перен. — в переносном значении

ПО — программное обеспечение преим. — преимущественно проф. — профессор син. — синоним собир. — собирательное сокр. — сокращение тж. — также чего-л. — чего-либо чем-л. — чем-либо чему-л. — чему-либо что-л. — что-либо чьей-л. — чьей-либо чью-л. — чью-либо

Английские

ch. — chapter dr. — doctor esp. — especially et al. — et alia etc. — et cetera /ap. — Japaneese sen. — senator smb. — somebody

smth. — something

v. — versus

Часть I

£ £ Age, health, life, death, soul

Life is like a roll of toilet paper; the closer you get to the end of the roll, the faster it goes.

Until the 20th century the average human lived about as long as a chimpanzee.

Few things are more tragic than the death of a woman in pregnancy or childbirth. An American woman is more likely to be struck by lighthing than to die in childbirth.

Each day 91 Americans die from an opioid overdose.

Who is not a patient?

Defining "conspicuous consumption" as "apparel, watches, jewel­lery, cars and other socially visible goods", she finds that even though the poor must dedicate much of their income to basic necessities, they devote a higher share of their total spending to conspicuous consumption than the rich do. And the trend is gaining steam. Between 1996 and 2014 the richest 1% fell further behind the national average in the percentage of their spending dedicated to bling. The middle income quintile went the other way: by 2014 they spent 35% more than the average as a percent­age of their annual expenditure.

Elephant corpses are centres of attraction for living elephants. They will visit them repeatedly, sniffing them with their trunks and rumbling as they do so. This is a species-specific response; elephants show no interest in the dead of any other type of animal. And they also react to elephant bones, as well as bodies, as Dr Wittemyer has demonstrated. Prompted by the anecdotes of others, and his own observations that an elephant faced with such bones will often respond by scattering them, he laid out fields of bones in the bush. Wild elephants, he found, can distinguish their conspecifics' skeletal remains from those of other species. And they do, indeed, pick them up and fling them into the bush.

Coca-Cola distribution is so broad, its marketing so expert that the Gates Foundation has urged vaccine campaigns to mimic its strategy.

Across the planet, 1.8bn human beings drink water contaminated with faeces.

Death through overwork is considered to be such a feature of the workplace in Japan that there is a word for it: karoshi.

Humans have always sought to intoxicate themselves.

Looking after someone with dementia can wipe out even a pros­perous family.

The promise of a longer life, well lived, would round a person out. But this vision of the future depends on one thing — that a long existence is also a healthy one. Humanity must avoid the trap fallen into by Tithonus, a mythical Trojan who was granted eternal life by the gods, but forgot to ask also for eternal youth. Eventually, he withered into a cicada.

In 2016 a coroner's office in Ohio had to store corpses in refrige­rated lorries for a week because residents were overdosing on opioids faster than their bodies could be processed.

How young is too young? Rich democracies give different answers, de­pending on the context: in New Jersey you can buy alcohol at 21 and cigarettes at 19, join the army at 17, have sex at 16 and be tried in court as an adult at 14.

Nothing ages faster than yesterday's dreams of tomorrow.

People around the world produce an estimated 6.4 trillion litres of urine every year.

Kids not born in the '90s, also didn't have kids in the 2010s. It's the echo of the echo.

Those who live to be very old are never previously famous. Few in the world know them, and they know almost nothing of the world.

One poll in 2016 found that French people are the most pessimis­tic on Earth, with 81% grumbling that the world is getting worse and only 3% saying that it is getting better.

End-of-life businesses also offer alternatives to costly temple grave­stones, such as scattering loved ones' ashes in Tokyo Bay (just don't tell the honeymooners to whom the boat is also offered).

More than 80% of the candidate drugs that make it into clinical trials because they worked in mice do not go on to work well in humans.

Hospital doctors have far more opportunities to earn substantial kick­backs — try seeing a good specialist in China without offering a fat "red envelope".

Every year 350 tonnes of cigarette butts, the equivalent in weight to two blue whales, are cleared off the streets of Paris alone.

The income-tax code is so knotty that America has as many tax prepar­ers per 1,000 people as Indonesia has doctors.

Diseases compete to kill people as they age; if one does not get you the next will.

Gay men's rate of anal cancer is the same as the rate of cervical cancer for women.

Julius Caesar (at the time in his 50s) swam nearly 300 metres or six lengths of an Olympic pool with his sword and purple cloak clenched between his teeth, apparently holding his official pa­pers dry above his head.

If you had to be reborn anywhere in the world as a person with average talents and income, you would want to be a Viking.

Life's candle burns most brightly when it is about to go out.

90% of the brain develops between the ages of zero to five, yet we spend 90% of our dollars on kids above the age of five.

It's a bit like being a doctor in a plague year; you'll be busy for a while, but it doesn't bode well for the long term.

John Graunt tallied causes such as "the King's Evil", a tubercular disease believed to be cured by the monarch's touch.

Many albinos are murdered by people who think that their bones contain gold or have magical powers. Some witchdoctors claim that amulets made from albino bones can cure disease or bring great wealth to those who wear them. Women are at higher risk of rape because of a myth that sex with an albino can cure HIV. A gruesome trade in their body parts has spurred killings in Tan­zania, Burundi, Mozambique, Zambia and South Africa.

Greater Manchester's 2.7m people make good guinea pigs for the experi­ment in combining health and social care — life expectancy is below av­erage, unemployment above it.

Drones can transport blood, but they can't transport doctors, who need roads.

"When good Americans die, they go to Paris," observed Thomas Gold Ap- pleton.

One high-class restaurant in Beijing specialises in animal penises, the eating of which is supposed to boost virility. Westerners visit for a titter, Chinese businessmen to impress their clients. (Yak pe­nis, says the eatery's website, is a "luxury gift for close friends".) A book of "traditional, health-preserving" recipes on sale in one of Beijing's biggest state-run bookshops includes the following reme­dy for impotence and premature ejaculation: "18 grams of caterpil­lar fungus; one fresh human placenta. Wash the caterpillar fungus and the placenta separately. Place in a saucepan, with water. Stew at high temperature until the placenta is cooked. (Drink the human placenta soup once a week for one or two weeks to see results.)"

Jeanne Calment, who lived for 122 years and 164 days (longer than any other person), said the secret to her longevity was a diet rich in olive oil, port wine and chocolate. She smoked until the age of 117. Alexander Imich, who was the oldest living man (111) until he died in June, did not have a secret. Asked how he lived so long, he replied, "I don't know, I sim­ply didn't die earlier."

Predictions without dates are easy. All trees fall; it is spotting the diseased ones that is trick.

In 1847 Ignac Semmelweis pioneered mother-friendly childbirth insisting that doctors should wash their hands between autopsy and delivery rooms.

Anti-corruption campaigners would have nothing to cheer if the cure ended up being more harmful than the disease.

Changing a face can change nothing, but facing a change can change everything.

People around the world produce an estimated 6.4 trillion litres of urine every year.

America's hospitals are the most expensive part of the world's most ex­pensive health system. They accounted for $851 billion, or 31%, of Ame­rican health spending in 2011. If they were a country, they would be the world's 16th-largest economy.

He learned about the "umbles": as hypothermia sets in you mum­ble, fumble, grumble, stumble, then finally tumble. Without help you die.

Asked the secret of his youthfulness, Benito Martinez Abrogan, 120, said he had never cheated a man or said bad things of other people.

Patriotism requires Medicare for all. Somehow, neither has caught on.

Patriotism requires Medicare for all. Somehow, neither has caught on.

Puffing 15-24 cigarettes a day, on average, robs a smoker older than 35 of five hours of life each and every day. But 20 minutes of moderate exer­cise a day earns almost an hour back. Alcohol wears a Janus face: the first drink of the day adds about 30 minutes per day to one's life expec­tancy, but each subsequent one cuts it back by 15 minutes.

The Amish in America spurn modern medicine, along with al­most everything else invented since the 17th century.

The UN reckons that by 2100 the planet's population will be rising past 10.9 billion, and be much older. The median age will go up from 29 to 41, and around 28% will be over 60. A few may even remember this article.

ERC, a research firm, says consumption per person was 999 ciga­rettes a year in 1990 and only 882 in 2012. Yet the appetite for cigarettes continues to rise. Smokers lit up 5.9 trillion times last year compared with 5.1 trillion in 1990. ERC tracks 123 countries, home to about 99% of smokers. It finds the worst addicts in cen­tral and eastern Europe. Serbians each smoke a lung-blackening 3,323 cigarettes per year, more than any other nationality. Eight of the top ten countries, ranked by consumption per person, are in the former Eastern block.

The more sophisticated the patient, the less scalpel-happy the doctors. The best informed patients of all are, of course, other doctors. Sure enough, physicians went under the knife much less often than the aver­age Ticino resident. Lawyers' wives — whom doctors have good reason to fear — had the fewest hysterectomies of all.

Walgreens is another operator of worksite clinics. One of its 358 centres is in Orlando, at the Disney theme park. It aims to treat Disney's "cast members" quickly (unblocking their huge ears and fixing their fairy wings, presumably), so they can go back to work.

Doctors manage to restart only about half of the hearts that stop in a hospital, and only about a sixth of patients will go on to survive long enough to be discharged. One of the toughest decisions faced by hospi­tal staff is how long to keep trying, and when to give up on a particular patient as a lost cause.

The lexicon of oncology is filled with military metaphors: the war on cancer, aggressive tumours, magic bullets. And although these are indeed only metaphors, they do reflect an underlying attitude — that it is the clinician's job to attack and destroy his patient's tumour directly, with whatever weapons are to hand. As in real warfare, those weapons may be conventional (surgery), chemical (cancer-killing drugs) or nuclear (radiation therapy). There is even talk of biological agents, in the form of viruses spe­cifically tailored to seek out and eliminate their tumorous targets. Which is all well and good as strategies go. But as Sun Tzu ob­served, the wisest general is not one who wins one hundred victo­ries in one hundred battles, but rather one who overcomes the ar­mies of his enemies without having to fight them himself. And one way to do that is to get someone else to do your fighting for you.

Is dumping faeces in rivers UN policy?

What is depression? The ancient Greeks believed it resulted from an imbalance in the body's four humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile (from the Greek word melas or "dark" and khole, meaning "bile"), with too much of the latter resulting in a melancholic state of mind. Early Christianity blamed the devil and God's anger for man's suffering, with depression the result of the struggle against worldly temptations and sins of the flesh. In the Renaissance it was viewed as a disease of scholars, such as Robert Burton, author of "The Anatomy of Melancholy", who were given to abstract and intense speculation.

The very notion of imposing a levy on calorific foods is very illiberal. What is the rationale? People who have sex without a condom also im­pose a burden on health services if they subsequently catch AIDS or oth­er sexually transmitted diseases. Should the condomless also be taxed?

Not quite old enough for Medicare (which typically kicks in at 65) and not quite poor enough for Medicaid.

In 2001 the Singapore-based WTO — that is, the World Toilet Organisa­tion — chose a day to mark the plight of the world's loo-less 2.5 billion (its slogan this year was "I give a shit, do you?"). At least 19 countries mark it. But not the UN, which is perhaps "scared of using the word 'toi­let'," a WTO spokesman muses.

In most countries it is illegal to buy or sell a kidney. If you need a transplant you join a waiting list until a matching organ be­comes available. This drives economists nuts. Why not allow willing donors to sell spare kidneys and let patients (or the gov­ernment, acting on their behalf) bid for them? The waiting list would disappear overnight. If John and Mary love each other but are married to other people, they will be tempted to leave their current partner and marry each other. But if John loves Mary, while Mary loves her husband more than John, both will stay put.

The birth and death phases of stars are associated with heavy dust clouds that give off an infra-red signal which might resemble the swarm of artificial satellites constituting a Dyson sphere.

In China a strong taboo hangs over discussing death.

Only 8% of South Africans opt for cremation, compared with a third in America, half in China, three-quarters in Britain and 95% in Japan. To many South Africans, cremation is taboo, not least because of ances­tor-worship and a propensity to commune with the dead. Many prefer a burial in the countryside where they were born.

Patrolling a rough neighbourhood is a health hazard.

Breast cancer is rare in men. And prostate cancer is obviously absent from women.

The Puente Hills landfill, an artificial mountain near Los Angeles is the biggest dump in America, 30 years old, 150 metres high and containing 130m tonnes of rubbish within a 700-acre footprint. If it were a building, it would be among the 20 tallest in the city. Building a rubbish pile is, it turns out, surprisingly high-tech.

If only we had been born clowns, nothing bad would happen to us except a few bruises and a smear of whitewash.

Fiat came round after a near-death experience.

As anyone who has been to Japan knows, there are strict rules about bathing in onsen, or hot springs. Bodies must be scrubbed beforehand, swimming trunks are banned and tattoos are taboo.

Sun, sea and alcohol, for at least two weeks a year, is now one of the unwritten rights of the British people.

A rising tide lifts all boats, but not all spirits.

One has always choose between cholera and plague in Kinshasa.

To celebrate falling fertility is like congratulating the captain of the Ti­tanic on heading towards the iceberg more slowly.

One suggested that driving damages the ovaries.

Mr Richards laid down the riffs and Mr Jagger provided the vocal pyro­technics. But time took its toll. Mr Richards's decision to give up heroin de­stroyed the delicate division of labour in which Mr Jagger took care of the details while Mr Richards took the drugs. Mr Jagger started to refer to the Stones as "his" band. He even performed the group's songs on solo tourse.

To live in Havana was to live in a factory that turned out human beauty on a conveyor-belt. He didn't want beauty.

GM spends more on health than it does on steel.

Many women still have no choice but to use dried leaves as sani­tary towels: a Korean-American missionary says the greatest gift you can give to a North Korean woman is a washable one made of fabric. "They cry with joy."

Over half the world's female suicides are Chinese. He has a brain-bank of 200 experts.

Humans have an uncontrollable urge to be precise, for better or (all too often) worse. That is a fine quality in a watch-repair man or a brain sur­geon, but counter-productive when dealing with uncertainty.

Most British towns have a Victorian pool or two, thanks to the 1846 Public Baths and Wash Houses Act, which gave local author­ities the power to raise funds to keep the working classes clean and healthy. Since then demand has ebbed: the poor have their own facilities these days and the rich slope off to private clubs.

As every actuary knows, the best way to live for a long time is to pick up your parents carefully.

£ £ Art, books, music, Hollywood, education, media

Who could paint an apple after Cezanne?

Viewers would decide in seven seconds whether or not to watch.

Michelangelo Merisi was omnisexual and died of sunstroke and syphilis, aggravated by lead poisoning from the paints he mixed.

Before the first world war the most exciting artists were French; in the 1990s they were Chinese. Now the hot new place for con­temporary art is Africa.

All you need for a movie is a girl, a gun, lots of singing, melodrama and never-ending dance sequences. Or so a big chunk of the Indian audience believes. Pre-screening rituals include burning camphor inside a sliced pumpkin before smashing it near the big screen to bring good luck.

Vincent Van Gogh died in obscurity, having sold only one painting.

BP will hope that having a new partner will work out better than it did for Anna Karenina, who flung herself in front of a train after the disinte­gration of her relationship with her replacement Russian lover.

Pablo Picasso: "Good artists copy, great artists steal."

No one has ever bothered to explain what "good" or "bad" jazz really is. When you see a live performance, you may be watching a 60-year-old musician playing a 100-year-old piece.

Of Nabokov's 19 fictions, no fewer than six wholly or partly con­cern themselves with the sexuality of prepubescent girls.

The painter was also a shrewd businessman; he mixed indigo and mad­der to replicate the effect of the period's most expensive pigment, Tyrian purple, which was extracted from sea snails and worth more than its weight in gold.

CNN's challenge is to attract more viewers when no one is shoot­ing anyone or blowing anything up.

Back when newspapers were king, Charles Brownson, an American con­gressman, used to say that one should never quarrel with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.

Artists came to paint and sculpt, writers to write, deadbeats to die, and a large share to drink and misbehave.

Only twice did George Martin, the Beatles record producer impose him­self: at the start, insisting that they replace Pete Best as their drummer, and at the end, when he agreed to record "Abbey Road" if they stopped fighting.

Socrates's bugbear was the spread of the biggest-ever innova­tion in communications — writing. He feared that relying on written texts, rather than the oral tradition, would "create for- getfulness in the learners' souls... they will trust to the exter­nal written characters and not remember of themselves." Enos Hitchcock voiced a widespread concern about the latest pub­lishing fad in 1790. "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth." (There was a related worry that sofas, introduced at the same time, encour­aged young people to drift off into fantasy worlds.) Cinema was denounced as "an evil pure and simple" in 1910; comic books were said to lead children into delinquency in 1954; rock'n'roll was accused of turning the young into "devil worshippers" in 1956; Hillary Clinton attacked video games for "stealing the in­nocence of our children" in 2005.

James Bond films are almost always the same: Bond is sent to an ex­otic location, meets and seduces a woman, gets caught by the villain, escapes, kills the villain and gets the girl.

Java sparrows are able to distinguish cubist paintings from im­pressionist and Japanese ones, and that pigeons can tell a Chagall from a Van Gogh, as well as discriminating between the Japanese school and the impressionist.

To build his factory, Mr Fazioli moved from Rome to Sacile, near Venice and, more important, near the Val di Fiemme, known as the "musical for­est" for spruce trees yielding especially resonant wood.

This book is a gem, and there are still 91 shopping days till Christ­mas.

"Terminator: Genisys", a flop in America with $90m in takings on a $155m production budget, was a blockbuster overseas, earning $351m, includ­ing $113m in China. Even if big names like these have lost some of their lustre at home, abroad they can be "sort of like supernovas", the stu­dio executive says. "They have flamed out a long time ago but the light shines on past their death."

Unable to reach any conclusion about what art is, he turns in­stead to what it is not. There are plenty of things that are not works of art: for example, human excrement. Probably. But what about Piero Manzoni, an Italian artist who died in 1963 after cre­ating an "edition" of 90 tin cans each containing 30 grams of his own excrement? The Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery and the Pompidou Centre snapped them up. More fool them, you say. Others would agree, but they would be no closer to defining what art is.

Albert Einstein, a huge fan of Bach's, advised others to "listen, play, love, revere — and keep your mouth shut."

Do orchestral conductors do anything useful?

Alfted Hitchcock, who knew about such things, explained the difference between shock and suspense. Shock is when a bomb suddenly explodes. Suspense is when viewers see a bomb beneath a table where people are peacefully chatting. Shock is seeing the tops of telephone poles and trees poking above roiling waters on one side of the two-lane causeway be­tween Morganza and Batchelor in Louisiana — particularly when the Mississippi River is on the other side of the road. Suspense is imagining where that water will be in a few days.

Salingerspent ten years writing "The Catcher in the Rye" and "the rest of his life regretting it," observe David Shields and Shane Salerno in a new biography and related documentary.

Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it," declared Bertolt Brecht.

Herodotus describes flying snakes, fox-sized ants that unearthed gold dust, men with the heads of dogs and others with no heads at all whose eyes are set in their chests. But, as with reports of the intervention of the gods, he often distances himself by remarking that he is not sure if he can believe what he has been told.

What price the Louvre, the Parthenon or Yellowstone National Park?

Imagine a place run by film stars — vain, power-hungry, para­noid, adored. Imagine they had been in charge not for the dura­tion of a reality television series but for decades in a territory containing 72m people and one of the world's largest cities. It would be a disaster zone, wouldn't it?

Does Cannes need to shock?

Horace Walpole always regretted the export to Russia of the le­gendary British art collection, fearing that it would be "burnt in a wooden palace on the first insurrection". But by a twist of fate, the sale saved the paintings. In 1789, ten years after they left, the Picture Gallery at Houghton was destroyed by fire.

"It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the mo­tion picture," observed Thomas Edison in 1913, predicting that books would soon be obsolete in the classroom.

There is now nothing you can imagine that cannot be shown by Hollywood.

To judge a painter, you have to wait at least two centuries.

Such schmaltzy songs as "White Christmas", "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" and "Let it Snow" were all by Jewish musicians.

The Library of Alexandria — built during the 3rd century BC to house the accumulated knowledge of centuries — reputedly had a copy (often the only copy) of every book in the world at the time. It burned to the ground sometime between Julius Caesar's conquest of Egypt in 48BC and the Muslim invasion in 640AD. Some historians believe the loss of the Alexandrian library, along with the dissolution of its huge community of scribes and scholars, created the conditions for the Dark Ages that descended across Europe as the Roman empire crumbled from within. A millennium of misery ensued, with ignorance and poverty the rule un­til the Renaissance dawned.

Paul Newman's blue eyes: cornflower blue, steel blue or ice blue?

"What is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records and Hollywood?" asked Adolf Hitler in 1940.

"Avatar", an enjoyable nonsense art.

No one in Hollywood cared what Emmanuelle wore, as long as she re­moved it. Her long, willowy body was rented out, to become the fantasy possession of thousands of devoted men. But her price was too high, and they would never have her.

Americans would sooner unplug their refrigerators than their cable boxes.

If Greece represented the first day in art, then these carved tusks and sculpted stones mark the dazzling light of its "early morning".

Last September the Boston Museum of Fine Arts bowed to pub­lic pressure and returned the top half of an 1,800-year-old statue called "Weary Herakles", which came from southern Turkey. Left to the museum by an American couple, its documented prove­nance went back no more than 30 years, which suggests it was looted, probably in the late 1970s. Mr Erdogan himself brought this trophy back to Turkey, reuniting the head and torso with the statue's bottom half.

A classical scholar at Winchester College and at Oxford, Frank Thomp­son was proficient in nine languages and a voracious reader. (He read "War and Peace" many times, once in Italian.)

"I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photo­graphers," Mahatma Gandhi once said.

Britain exports around 3% of the world's goods and 6% of the world's services, but the country's artists account for around 13% of global mu­sic sales.

A sense of comedy is never far off. "Mount Sepsick! Mount Spit- telboom!" cries the wicked brother in another story, groping for the magic words that will open the cave. "Mount Siccapillydir- cus!" he tries again in desperation.

Some may have been sudoku, tredoku or futoshiki freaks, who buy daily newspapers, extract the puzzle pages and throw away the rest.

Forgers nowadays typically favour 20th-century abstract and ex­pressionist styles. Mimicking Jackson Pollock's drip-and-splatter paintings is easier than faking old masters such as Rembrandt. Swamped with lawsuits, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation stopped authenticating works in 1996, four decades after Pollock's death. Lawsuits continued anyway. A court even entertained a suit from a man with a painting signed "Pollack".

A publicist who specializes in selling sauce to the tabloids.

Dante's complicated ABA, BCB, CDC, DED.

Music is a mystery. It is unique to the human race: no other species pro­duces elaborate sound for no particular reason.

Miss Lena Horne's producers once complained that she opened her mouth too wide to sing. They meant it was a Negro thing.

If you want to get a message down into the soul of a God-fearing, native- to-the-earth, rural-thinking person, one of the surest ways is through traditional country music — anyone who wants to understand the world's most politically influential tribe — the people of Middle America, who pick most American presidents — should pay attention to country music. Country music has always been the best shrink that 15 bucks can buy.

You're not going to sit down and watch the BBC world news in 3-D.

A Hollywood executive is powerful and successful largely because he is viewed as being powerful and successful... A group of terrorists is plan­ning to kill millions of Americans. Only one man can stop them: Jack Bauer. Unfortunately, he has been imprisoned in a secret facility. And tortured. Then decapitated and fed to boars. In a typical day, Agent Bauer is shot and stabbed more often than he takes bathroom breaks, but it never seems to slow him down. That was a spoof of "24" by Dave Barry, a comic writer. All this is harmless fantasy, of course. Or is it? A discon­certing number of Americans take "24" seriously.

Introducing Huck Finn, Mark Twain gave warning: "Persons at­tempting to And a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to And a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to And a plot in it will be shot."

Michelangelo is a sculptor, a painter and an architect, he sees every­thing in three dimensions. It is as though he has put the human body on a spindle and is turning it back to front in one view.

More seasoned PR flacks might have done it differently. First, lunch the journalists concerned, ostensibly to discuss some other story. Then, over dessert, casually slip into the conversation the poison that their secret client wanted them to spread. With luck the reporters would follow up on the scuttlebutt without men­tioning its source, assuring themselves that they had got the sto­ry through their "contacts".

Imagine, further, that every newspaper felt obliged to print such choice items as this: "The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, has sent a reply cable of thanks to Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, Deputy Premier, Minister of Defence and Aviation and Inspector-General, thanking the Crown Prince and all personnel of the armed forces for their congratulations to the King on the occasion of Eid al Fitr, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan, in the cable sent earlier to the King by the Crown Prince."

It is too easy to pass the test that determines whether a film is suf­ficiently British to be worthy of state support. Because the criteria include where a film is set and the nationality of its main cha­racters, actors and scriptwriters, film-makers can easily qualify by adding a few minor details, such as shoot-outs in Waterloo station and the assassination in the first few minutes of a Brit­ish journalist (both features of "The Bourne Ultimatum"). Even these literary touches may be unnecessary: films such as "Dark Knight", a Batman movie set in mythical Gotham City, also qualify for subsidy because chunks are filmed in Britain and they em­ploy local people in important positions.

He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.

Virtually every day of the year sees another art biennial opening somewhere in the world.

In most German states, after just four years of primary school children are steamed into one of several types of secondary school: clever kids attend Gymnasien, middling ones Realschulen and the slowest learners Hauptschulen, which are supposed top prepare them for trades. Chil­dren at the bottom often face low-wage drudgery or the dole.

3-D movies add one more layer of reality to the unreality.

Paul Hendrickson's bibliography lists 76 biographical works about Er­nest Hemingway, nine of them by wives, siblings and children, followed by memoirists, respected biographers and hangers on, pretenders and doctoral students.

The "Lula, Son of Brazil" film is very watchable.

Our media act as if American manufacturing is going to grind to a halt at around two o'clock this afternoon.

"Garbology" is a word popularized (and possibly coined) by A. J. Weberman, a writer and activist whose credo was "you are what you throw away".

He beg an his job with little respect from the media and ended up with zero.

His book is all preface and no body.

During his years as an insider he has acquired the typical habits of mind of veteran Washingtonians: an obsession with spin and gossip, includ­ing an over-inflated sense of the importance of newspaper articles; a hyper-sensitive nose for threats; and, it would appear, a determination to destroy his enemies by whatever means necessary.

Eagle-eyed publishers will have noticed a discernible trend in contemporary Christmas stockings: that the pot pourri of little bits of coal, tangerines, chocolate coins and other semi-useless items should also include a small book that fits neatly into one's handbag or above the cistern. Not only is this trend infinitely self- improving, but it has resulted in dramatic sales figures for items such as "Schott's Miscellany" and "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", both of which spent many pre- and post-Christmas weeks on the best­seller list in recent years.

America has been fabulously successful at providing its projectors with Grand Academies in the form of lavishly-funded think-tanks, well over 100 of them in Washington alone. And American projectors have been superb at getting their message across. America boasts a vast array of magazines, such as the American Interest and the New Republic, which like nothing better than picking up "hot" new ideas. And America's po­licy intellectuals have a talent for packaging their ideas in provocative ways — for declaring not just that the cold war is winding down but that history is ending, not just that regional tensions are rising but that the world is entering a clash of civilizations.

A picture gallery is a dull place for a blind man.

Rembrandt says things for which there are no words in any language.

Nietzsche: "We have art in order not to die from the truth."

££ Business, money, trade, economics, professions

America is a brand. Trash it, and the costs of every global transaction will rise. A dealmaker cannot want that.

Being born rich (or marrying well) becomes a surer route to suc­cess than working hard or starting a firm. It is a recipe for social stagnation, and perhaps crisis.

At an auction organised by Stack's Bowers on March 31st, 2017, an Ame­rican cent from 1793 sold for $940,000, becoming the costliest penny ever.

Starbucks opens a new branch in China every 15 hours.

Those timorous chief executives serve longer than the average Roman emperor did: bosses departing in 2015 had an average of 11 years in of­fice for S&P 500 firms, the highest figure for 13 years.

Making money yourself from investing other people's has been a good business for over a century.

Datang, China's "sock city" near Hangzhou in 2014 it made 26bn pairs of socks, some 70% of China's production.

As Warren Buffett puts it, "What is smart at one price is dumb at another."

Foreign workers may make goods but American cashiers still sell them.

In private equity nowadays, it seems, what counts is less the depth of your pockets than speed on your feet.

If liking motorcycles turns out to predict a lower IQ, he asks, should em­ployers be allowed to reject job applicants who admit to liking motor­cycles?

Oil's well that ends well.

But if the history of gold is any guide, what goes up will come down — and then go up again.

Economists and psychologists talk about the "curse of know­ledge": people who know something have a hard time imagining someone else who does not.

Migrants from the countryside in China numbered 282m at the end of last year, 4m more than in 2015 (an increase in just one year equivalent to the population of Los Angeles).

Bankers typically make money by charging a higher rate for loans than they pay to depositors: the so-called 3-6-3 model (borrow at 3%, lend at 6% and be on the golf course by 3pm).

Seeing more sedans than pickup trucks, for instance, strongly suggests that a neighbourhood tends to vote for the Democrats.

Build a better mousetrap, the saying goes, and the world will beat a path to your door. Find a way to beat the stockmarket and they will construct a high-speed railway.

Executives justify flying private on the grounds that they may need to get back to the office quickly in an emergency, and that confidential documents or company devices may be lost or stolen on a commercial flight. But when they enjoy that extra security, they are exposing them­selves to another risk: private-plane crashes are a leading cause of death for CEOs, behind only heart attacks, cancer and strokes.

In cheap action films the bad guy is taken out by force. In the bet­ter sort, he falls victim to his own hubris. The great risk, though, is that Europe and Russia find themselves in a film noir, where the villain's plot fails but takes everyone down with it.

You make your money working in active management but invest the proceeds passively.

Being in the chemicals business is like swimming in a vat of sul­phuric acid.

In trade as elsewhere, the new administration seems prone to using sta­tistics as a drunk uses a lamppost — for support rather than illumination.

Like an errant husband, investors may proclaim their fidelity to democracy but are not averse to seeing someone else on the side.

There are many ways to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Malls were conceived in the 1950s by Victor Gruen, an Austrian immigrant, as a new enclosed version of a town square.

China has a history of hilariously inappropriate export brand-names, including Front Gate men's underwear, Long March luggage and, guar­anteed to raise a laugh, Great Leap Forward floor polish.

It is impossible to know if a television viewer has gone to the bathroom during the commercials. Fraud is a peskier problem. Bad actors hide within advertising's supply chain, unleashing ro­bots to "see" ads and suck money from advertisers.

In 2014 the International Energy Agency (IEA), a semi-official forecaster, predicted that decarbonising the global electricity grid will require al­most $20trn in investment in the 20 years to 2035, at which point the process will still be far from finished.

Mr Xi is China's "COE", or chairman of everything.

The prices of good and bad tulips soared alike in 17th-century Hol­land, and in 2008 subprime debt was almost as valuable as Treasury

bonds.

For investors the most dangerous words in the English language are "this time it's different".

Why don't fund managers look out of the window in the mornings? Be­cause then they'd have nothing to do in the afternoons.

If all the nation's economists were laid end to end, they would point in all different directions.

The use of tractors in agriculture rose sharply from the 1910s to the 1950s, and horses were displaced in vast numbers. As demand for tra­ditional horse-work fell, so did horse prices, by about 80% between 1910 and 1950. As the numbers of working horses and mules in America fell from about 21m in 1918 to only 3m or so in 1960, the decline was mir­rored in the overall horse population.

Acquirers only want the family silver, not the dross.

You can display your yacht in a way that you can't show off your house or hotel suite, because there is always the option of weighing anchor and taking it into the middle of the ocean where you don't have to socia­lise with anybody except the glitterati. Superyacht owners are always dropping in on each other as they criss-cross the seas, to compare not just their vessels but also their guest lists. When the Monaco Yacht Show started in 1991 there were just 1,147 superyachts (that is, yachts longer than 30 metres) in the global superyacht fleet. Today there are 4,473, with another 473 under construction.

To make or to buy is perhaps the most basic question in business.

It is hard to when bubbles will pop, in particular when they are nested within each other predict.

Politician + pump prices + poll = panic.

America's dynamic economy creates and destroys around 5m jobs each month.

Returns on rare coins over ten years to the end of 2016 were 195%, easily beating art (139%), stamps (133%), furniture (-31%) and the S&P 500 index (58%). Coins are more portable than paintings or furniture, and boast a higher value-to-volume ratio. Stamps may be lighter, but, come doomsday, cannot be melted down. Today, global sales of rare coins are estimated at $5bn-8bn a year, with 85% of the market in America.

An authoritarian government can provide certainty, at least in the short term. In 1922, when Mussolini took power in Italy, its equity market re­turned 29% and its government bonds 18%, according to Mike Staunton of the London Business School. Hitler's accession in 1933 saw German shares return 14% and bonds 15%.

If you want to get rich, goes a Chinese saying, first build a road.

The bond market looks about as intimidating as a chihuahua in a handbag.

One calls him the best possible pilot of the worst possible aircraft.

Notes such as one with a face value of 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollars are worth much more now as a novelty on eBay (where they sell for about $45) than they ever were in shops in Harare.

Like politicians, financial regulators know that late on a Friday is a good time to slip out bad news.

The National Resistance Movement in Uganda bribed voters with hoes, saucepans, seeds, sugar and salt.

Richard Nixon saw China's potential in 1971 ("Put 800m Chinese to work under a decent system — and they will be the leaders of the world"). But, before he died in 1994, he came to fear that "we may have created a Frankenstein".

Everyone is a capitalist these days. That means keeping a much closer eye on those who manage that capital.

Pushing down prices on one side of the platform may cause charges on the other side to rise, a bit like a waterbed.

"Cocaine," said Robin Williams, a comedian who was rueful about addic­tion, "is God's way of saying that you're making too much money."

Children are sometimes reassured that new siblings arrive via friendly storks. The reality is messier. Money creation is much the same. The "stork" in this case is the central bank; many think it transfers money to private banks, which act as intermediaries, pushing the money around the economy. In reality, most money is created by private banks.

In a recent report McKinsey, a consulting firm, looked at five measures of Africa's economic connection with the world: trade, investment stock, investment growth, infrastructure financing and aid. It found that China is among the top four partners in each of these.

Two hundred metric tons of gold would occupy a cube of a little more than two meters on a side — it would fit into a small bed­room.

Forget left and right. These days, it is often said, the real dividing line in politics is between open-door liberals and pull-up-the-drawbridge na­tionalists.

Unless you are a hermit, you own and consume things that have passed through the port of Rotterdam.

The arrival of mass democracy after 1918 was followed by a boom in the 1920s but then by the Depression, stockmarket collapse and abandon­ment of the gold standard.

Trade deals are started by liberals but finished by protectionists.

Valeant describes itself as "bringing value to our shareholders". While there is no indication of fraudulent or illegal practice, the company could end up joining a pantheon of corporate fiascos that includes En­ron (which pledged to "create significant value for our shareholders"), Lehman Brothers, ("maximising shareholder value") and MCI WorldCom ("a proven record of shareholder value creation").

Teodoro Obiang, the president of Equatorial Guinea, and Teodo- rin, the most influential of his 42 recognised children, have ex­pensive tastes. While most of his citizens live on less than $2 a day, the older Mr Obiang once shelled out $55 million for a Boeing 737 with gold-plated lavatory fittings. His son had at one point amassed $300m in assets, including 32 sports cars, a Malibu man­sion and nearly $2m in Michael Jackson memorabilia. In 2014 the United States Department of Justice forced Teodorin Obiang to sell off a Ferrari, his Los Angeles abode and six life-size Michael Jackson statues in a money-laundering settlement. (He was al­lowed to keep one of the King of Pop's crystal-encrusted gloves.)

Slavery in America was not just wicked, it was lucrative: by 1860 the total capital that slave-holders had "invested" in captive human beings was three times larger than investment in manufacturing in the northern and southern states combined.

China produced more steel in two years than Britain since 1900.

The US is still the US, held together by credit cards and Indian names.

China's problems are so many, various and deep that it does in­deed seem impossible that the Communist Party can survive. Yet it raises the opposite question too: what, then, has held such an improbable regime together for so long?

Creating pay structures that perfectly reflect performance is a mug's game. That hasn't stopped an entire industry of consultants and proxy advisers from trying. Setting detailed targets risks distorting behaviour.

The company that establishes itself early enjoys disproportionate rewards. First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.

One Western company urged its employees to "act like an owner" with­out realising that, in some cultures, acting like an owner means playing golf all day.

Bad money chases out good.

Authenticity is the secret of success; once you can fake it, you've got it.

There are more people in America who believe that Elvis is still alive than thought Obama's stimulus would create jobs.

Class identifying markers: occupation, address, accent and income.

That openness is evident across British life. The country's car in­dustry is almost totally foreign owned (Tata has made a great success of Jaguar Land Rover); many of its biggest airports are in Spanish hands; chunks of its energy industry belong to French and Chinese investors; its football clubs make the United Nations look monocultural. Its central bank is run by a Canadian and the London Olympics were organised by an Australian. London's glitziest property developers are from Qatar and Malaysia and its stock exchange may soon be in German hands. In 2013 the pro­portion of shares in Britain's firms owned by foreigners zoomed passed the 50% mark, to almost total public indifference.

What gets measured gets managed.

A country where shareholders with opinions have hitherto been about as welcome as skunks at a garden party.

Cost of capital is now king. The king seems to live in China.

What is poverty and when is a person poor? Does a family home have a dirt or dung floor? Does it lack a decent toilet? Must mem­bers of the household travel more than 30 minutes on foot to get clean water to drink? Do they live without electricity?

Lehman Brothers disaster would never have happened if it had been Lehman Sisters.

Walmart's 2.2m worldwide workforce is about the same size as China's army, excluding reservists.

We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shop, taught in the Pullman school, catechised in the Pullman church, and when we die we shall be buried in the Pullman cemetery and go to the Pullman hell.

The wealth distribution in the world is equivalent to a world of ten people, in which one has $1,000 and the other nine has $1 each.

John Maynard Keynes still best describes the challenge facing the dis­cipline today: "Economics is the science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contem­porary world."

Why didn't Sony invent the iPod?

The Busara Centre for Behavioural Economics in Nairobi, Kenya, runs experiments with participants from slums and rural areas. Its re­searchers looked at the results of a lottery-like scheme in rural Kenya, in which a random sample of 503 households spread over 120 villages was chosen to receive cash transfers of up to $1,525. The average trans­fer, $357, was almost enough to double the wealth of a typical villager. The researchers measured the well-being of villagers before and after the transfer, using a range of different methods: questionnaires about people's life satisfaction, screening for clinical depression and saliva tests for Cortisol, a hormone associated with stress. There is an asym­metry in the way people compare themselves with others. We tend to look exclusively at those better off than us, rather than contemplate our position within the full range of outcomes. When the lot of others improves, we react negatively, but when our own lot improves, we shift our reference group to those who are still better off. In other words, we are never satisfied, since we quickly become accustomed to our own achievements. Perhaps that is what spurs people to earn more, and economies to grow.

The latest rally has been led by a small namber of stocks, some­times dubbed the FAANGs (Facebook, Amason, Apple, Netflix and Google's parent, Alphabet) and sometimes FAAMG (replacing Netflix with Microsoft).

Should guests really expect authentic affection from staff whose weekly wage is less than their minibar bill?

Sometimes when you make a step forward you step in shit.

It is amazing how little $25m buys you these days.

Winston Churchill famously said America would always do the right thing after exhausting the alternatives.

If bullshit was currency, he would be a billionaire.

Slave ships could be smelled from miles away.

My watch costs more than your car... that's who I am.

Putting your man in charge is one thing, putting money on the table quite another.

Consultants steal your watch and then tell you the time.

Ford famously said that car-buyers could have any colour they liked, as long as it was black.

Rise early, work hard, strike oil.

They say that money can't buy happiness, but I would like to find out for myself if that's true.

Adam Smith spotted that economics has problems valuing nature. "Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce anything; scarce anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contra­ry, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it," he wrote.

"For a moderate fee," jokes Deirdre McCloskey, an economic histo­rian, "an economist will tell you with all the confidence of a witch doctor that interest rates will rise 56 basis points next month or that dropping agricultural subsidies will increase Swiss national income by 14.8%."

Haier and higher!

Britain had a window tax in the late 17 th century, well before it introduced an income tax.

Pay the gas bill first, in other words, and then think of the world cruise.

The economic forces driving high-flying legal eagles into the bar­gain bin are no mystery.

The typical chief executive is more than six feet tall, has a deep voice, a good posture, a touch of grey in his thick, lustrous hair and, for his age, a fit body.

Running US Steel at the turn of the 20th century, Charles Schwab was perhaps the first person in America to earn a salary of $lm a year. What made him so successful? Was he a genius? No. Did he know more about steel than other people? Certainly not. So how did he get ahead? Schwab knew how "to make people like him".

At present the tallest is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which was completed in 2010 and, at 828 metres, shot past the previous record-holder, the 508-metre Taipei 101 tower. The Mecca Royal Clock Tower in Saudi Arabia, completed in 2012, is now, at 601 metres, the second-tallest. The Freedom Tower in lower Manhattan, built near the site of the World Trade Centre's twin towers (417 metres and 415 metres) that were destroyed by al-Qaeda in 2001, had its spire added in May to reach 541 metres. But work has now started on the Kingdom Tower in Jed- dah, Saudi Arabia. Its exact proposed height is still a secret, but it will be at least a kilometre.

Scratch the surface of the planet and the chances that hydro­carbons will spew forth appear to grow by the day. This week America's Energy Information Administration (EIA) released new estimates of the amount of gas in the world's shale beds. It reck­ons that there are 7,299 trillion cubic feet, 10% more than its 2011 estimate. The EIA's estimates for shale oil, not included in the 2011 numbers, are a staggering 345 billion barrels, adding a tenth to the world's total oil resources.

You can happily go through a day consuming nothing but the products of family concerns: reading the New York Times (or the Daily Mail), driv­ing a BMW (or a Ford or a Fiat), making calls on your Samsung Galaxy, munching on Mars Bars and watching Fox on your Comcast cable.

He was a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks.

Koch Industries has also demonstrated a striking ability to reform itself. Prodded by the spate of legal suits in the late 1990s, the firm introduced a big safety programme. Charles's corporate mantra was "10,000% compli­ance with all laws and regulations", by which he meant 100% compliance from 100% of employees.

Gold miners were supposed to be "believers" in gold rather than efficient managers out to maximise profits.

The best way to find Albany on a map is to look for the intersection of greed and ambition.

Simon Kuznets, a Nobel laureate, is supposed to have remarked: "There are four kinds of countries in the world: developed coun­tries, undeveloped countries, Japan and Argentina."

The supply side sets the scene; the demand side provides the drama.

Facebook, Google and Groupon were all founded by people in their 20s or teens. Mark Zuckerberg, aged 27, will soon be able to count his years on earth in billions of dollars.

Relying on the import of money, workers and brains, America is a Ponzi scheme that works.

Managers who rely too much on their strengths may become hammers that see every problem as a nail.

Diamonds, famously, are a girl's best friend, graphite makes good pencil lead.

Walmart, the world's biggest retailer, has 1,500 employees in Sili­con Valley trying to out-Amazon Amazon in areas such as logis­tics and making the most of social media.

Of the 7 billion people alive on the planet, 1.1 billion subsist below the internationally accepted extreme-poverty line of $1.25 a day. America's poverty line is $63 a day for a family of four.

When, as happened during the Napoleonic wars, a slaver's ship was captured by French privateers, the blacks aboard were often treated more carefully than the white seamen. The blacks were prized goods and their worth soared as commodity-based booms in the New World overwhelmed the sentiments of liberty, equal­ity and fraternity. Once enslaved, the Africans were valuable as "investments (purchased and then rented out as labourers), credit (used to secure loans), property, commodities, and capital, mak­ing them an odd mix of abstract and concrete values."

Hundreds of jobs depend on Hollywood productions: blockbusters may require the help of as many as 1,000 firms. Producers need massages, as­sistants require stationery and starlets want scented candles and fresh roses; let alone what props managers, set-builders and costume depart­ments will holler for.

Aluminium was once more costly than gold. Napoleon III, emper­or of France, reserved cutlery made from it for his most favoured guests, and the Washington monument, in America's capital, was capped with it not because the builders were cheapskates but be­cause they wanted to show.

The farthing was once made of silver, was steadily switched to cheaper copper, tin and bronze.

I am young and unemployed and face a lifetime on the dole. Why? This morning I collected my jobseekers allowance from my bank, where I have it paid directly into my account. I did not see a cashier, but withdrew money from a cash point. Then I went to the supermarket and bought French apples, German sausage and Danish bacon. I scanned the items at a self-service till, no need for a check-out assistant. I went home, switched on my Chinese computer and applied for jobs online. I do not send letters through the post; e-mail is more convenient. I then shopped online, I rarely use local shops. Who can I blame for the lack of jobs?

The original sin begins (depending on the chapter) in 1914, when the world suspended the gold standard at the start of the first world war; in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt devalued the dollar against gold; in 1971, when Richard Nixon ended the dollar's convertibility to gold under the Bretton Woods system; or in 1987, when Alan Greenspan cut interest rates after the stockmarket crash.

What is the single most important price in the world? Popular an­swers are the price of oil, American interest rates or the dollar. Yet Chinese wages are, arguably, more important. China has by far the world's biggest labour force, of around 800m — almost twice that of America, the European Union and Japan combined.

In 1820, as some historians reckon and Chinese commentators like to point out, China's GDP was one-third of the world total. Then the rever­sals of the century of humiliation brought it low. By the 1960s, China's GDP had dropped to just 4% of the world total. Now it has recovered to about one-sixth of the world's GDP — and at least 90% of America's — in purchasing-power parity terms, according to the Conference Board, a business research organisation. Nationalists eagerly await the day when China's economy becomes once more the biggest in the world by any measure.

The super-duper rich are surprisingly unimaginative when it comes to dreaming up new ways to outdo each other. It includes such essentials as a mini-submarine, a hair salon and two heli­pads. Owning a yacht with only one helipad would be embar­rassing — a bit like owning a football club that is only fourth in England's Premier League.

Over 1.2 billion people have to defecate in the open. Surprisingly, some of those who have to defecate in the open do not mind. Some rural men, and even women, quite enjoy a social squat in the bushes. Slum-dwellers in Nairobi have to pick their way through streams of sewage and take care to avoid "flying toilets", plastic bags filled with excrement that are flung with desperate abandon into the night. Nearly two-fifths of the United States' 25,000 sewer systems illegally discharged raw sewage or other nasty stuff into rivers or lakes in 2007-09, and over 40% of the country's waters are considered dangerously polluted. Contaminated water lays low almost 20m Americans a year.

Cyprus never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

In Ghana the funereal send-off is as important as the life itself. But the costs, borne by extended families, can be punitive. Some 45% live on less than $1 a day, 79% on less than $2. Yet funerals tend to cost between $2,000 and $3,500. "Money measures the quality of the funeral and the family," says Sjaak van der Geest, an anthropologist. The more cash spent, the higher the reputation of the deceased and the family. Mr Okai died in hospital, then spent almost three months in the morgue, at a cost of $521: the longer your body is in the fridge, the more prestigious. The Ga king, recently buried in Accra, was on ice for 18 months; the Dagbon king, in northern Ghana, for a record four years.

Nobody knows how many homeless there are in Paris.

US Treasury Secretary Geithner's life in the trenches has produced its own vocabulary. Serious decisions are "consequential", good ideas are "cool", better ideas are "compelling" and the best ideas are at "the opti­mal frontier". During a crisis "plan beats no plan", jury-rigged measures in the face of unavoidable disaster are "foam on the runway", and bad outcomes are "dark". Managing public perceptions is called "theatre". "Fuck" also holds a prominent place in the Geithner lexicon, usually as an adjective, not a verb, as in "I have no fucking idea."

China's epic industrial boom will not be repeated; the days of making billions by shipping iron ore from Goa to Guangdong are over.

You have a decent job and work hard. You keep your nose clean, respect authority and have never joined a protest march. Suddenly you have the bad luck to face a cruel and seemingly impossible choice. Your superiors tell you to do something outrageous or unacceptable. Do you obey or, at grave personal cost, refuse?

China makes things you can drop on your foot. America merely designs, brands and peddles them.

As Fred Hirsch argued in his 1977 book, "The Social Limits to Growth", many good things in life are "positional". You can enjoy them only if others don't. Sometimes, a quick car, fine suit or attractive house is not enough. One must have the fastest car, finest suit or priciest house.

Consumers cannot compare what is legally produced in Califor­nia with what is legally produced in Colorado — to say nothing of what is illegally sold in New York's Washington Square Park.

Ekhart, Indiana, is the RV capital of the world.

Until recently, Carrefour's supermarkets in France were run along Napoleonic lines. Strict orders emanated from its head­quarters in Paris. Every store sold a similar range of products. If selling groceries were like marching an army over the Alps, this strategy would have worked brilliantly. But it isn't, and it didn't. At the big Carrefour in Monacoout went the racks of cheap lug­gage, of the sort chic locals would be embarrassed to see their servants carrying.

Mr Abe promised that Japan would enter trade negotiations to join the American-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — though he offered no promise to eliminate tariffs of up to 777.7% on rice.

Big pickups are seen in the car industry as a leading indicator: rising sales point to Americans starting to build kitchens, fix roofs and hire contractors.

Family history has large effects that persist for much greater spans of time. Fathers matter, but so do grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Indeed, it may take as long as 300-500 years for high- and low-status families to produce descendants with equal chances of being in various parts of the income spectrum.

Some 3m wrecks pepper the ocean floors, according to the UN (though few contain riches). Finding them involves lengthy re­search and lucky breaks. Recovery can take months of work by specialist crews. Of 52 annual reports filed by publicly listed shipwreck-recovery firms since 1996, only five show a net profit.

Acquisitions can also be a form of financial engineering. This was a fa­vourite game of the conglomerates of the 1970s and 1980s. A company with highly rated shares would bid for a group with poorly rated equity. Say Acme has 100m shares, earnings of $10m (earnings per share of 10 cents) and a share price of $2 (a price-earnings ratio of 20). Grotco has the same earnings and number of shares but its share price is just $1 (a p/e of 10). If Acme makes an all-share bid valuing Grotco at $1.20, it will need to issue 60m new shares. The combined group will have $20m of earnings, 160m shares and earnings per share of 12.5 cents. With the help of nothing more than maths, Acme's earnings per share will have jumped by 25%. Merger booms usually peak with the kind of deal that resembles a Las Vegas wedding after an alcohol-fuelled night: both par­ties regret it in the morning.

Chairman Mao, as ever, had said it best: imagine the ping-pong ball as the head of your capitalist opponent, and each shot a point for the motherland.

Overall, the number without homes in the US is staggering. The number of homeless veterans of the Vietnam war is greater than the number who died in it. On any given night in America more than 640,000 men, women and children are forced to seek shelter, live in their cars, or sleep on the streets. Last year nearly 1.6m people used an emergency shelter.

A Polish Jew in an Episcopal graveyard in a largely Dominican neighbourhood. What could be more New York?

Obama sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.

The average Swiss watch costs $685. A Chinese one costs around $2 and tells the time just as well (see chart). So how on earth, a Martian might ask, can the Swiss watch industry survive? Yet it does. Few can match the precision of a Nivarox ("Nicht variabel oxydfest" (G.) or "Non-Variable Non-Oxidizing") balance spring.

The euro needs French reform, German extravagance and Italian politi­cal maturity.

In happier days before the euro crisis, one government in Lisbon rebranded the Algarve as the Allgarve, hoping to appeal to Eng­lish-speaking tourists. Now a Portuguese wit suggests rebrand- ing the whole country as Poortugal.

The cult of the insider in Japan is rooted in its paddy fields, some schol­ars argue. To cultivate wet rice, villagers need to work together, sharing land, labour, water and gossip. Anyone not in the group is out of the loop. There is something of the rice paddy about Japan's capital markets, too.

"LVMH is like a mini Germany," boasts an insider. Like that coun­try's Mittelstand, it has built a reputation for craftsmanship and quality that people are happy to pay extra for. The difference is, the Mittelstand makes unsexy things such as machine tools and shaving brushes, whereas LVMH makes champagne, handbags and other objects of desire.

The 1912 games were the last one where gold medals were made entirely of gold. Now they consist mainly of silver with a thin coat of gold. Win­ners in London are advised not to bite too hard on their medals, as they will have a gold content of only about 1.5%.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote that: "In every big transaction, there is a magic moment during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is due to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer will make the moment his own, pos­sessing the treasure for a magic microsecond, taking a little of it, passing it on." Like so many novelists, he was talking bosh. No alert lawyer takes only "a little".

When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton, a prolific bank robber (pictured, after he retired), is said to have replied: "Because that's where the money is." Sutton reportedly pinched $2m during a lifetime of crime.

The phenomenon has been described as the Wimbledon effect: Britain provides the beautiful arena where foreign champions come and beat the hell out of British players. The annual Oxford- Cambridge Boat Race is much the same: a slugfest between pre­dominantly non-British mercenaries.

The real money is where the pain is.

The human animal is a beast that must die. If he's got money, he buys and buys and buys everything he can, in the crazy hope one of those thing.

"Corruption is rampant at high levels, and at low levels," said an FBI agent, before adding: "and all levels in between".

Foreign remittances continue to grow. In all, 250m migrant work­ers will send home $500 billion this year — up from $410 billion in 2012. At their destination savings often end up under the mat­tress — rather than channelled into microfinance schemes, for instance, as many development experts have long hoped. The marriage between remittances and microfinance has not hap­pened yet.

"Republican gluttons of privilege" who had "stuck a pitchfork in the farmer's back".

He spent his entire career within the DeBeers stable.

It takes pride in sticking to its companies through thick and thin.

The distinction between being a successful tycoon and being an enemy of the people has been blurred.

Marriott likes to buy to the sound of cannons and sell to the sound of violins.

40% of Missourians would oppose a new tax even if it was be­ing used "to construct the landing pad for the second coming of Christ".

Once upon a time the overstressed executive bellowing orders into a telephone, cancelling meetings, staying late at the office and dying of a heart attack was a stereotype of modernity. Cardiac arrest — and, indeed, early death from any cause — is the prerogative of underlings. The best medicine, then, is promotion. Prosper, and live long.

Narcissism index indicators of CEO: prominence of the boss's photo in the annual report, company press releases. Length of his Who is Who entry, frequency of his use of the first singular

interviews, ratios of cash compensation to second-highest paid exec.

Of course, successfully picking the leader of a big public company has always been tricky, because the job requires at least two quite differ­ent skills. Like the fox, a chief executive must know lots of little things, must manage successfully the key day-to-day aspects of the business. But like the hedgehog, he must also know one big thing: every three or four years, he will have to take a substantial strategic decision, which may mortally wound the business, if he gets it wrong. Plenty of giants, such as Cable & Wireless and AT&T, have had leaders who passed the fox test but failed the hedgehog one.

The Chinese dragon's coils encircling the world are getting tight­er by the day.

In business, as in photography, it pays to stay focused.

The number of people in the United States living in poverty in­creased last year to 39.8 million — the highest percentage of the population in 11 years, the Census Bureau said Thursday. The number equals 13.2 percent of the country's population and is 2.5 million more than were living in poverty in 2007, which is defined by the agency as a person making less than $10,991 or a family of four making less than $22,025.

This new elite is not just a breed apart. It lives apart, in bubbles such as Manhattan south of 96th Street (where the proportion of adults with col­lege degrees rose from 16% in 1960 to 60% in 2000) and a small number of "SuperZips", neighbourhoods where wealth and educational attainment are highly concentrated. These neighbourhoods are whiter and more Asian than the rest of America. They have less crime and more stable families. They are not, pace Mr Gingrich, necessarily "liberal": plenty of SuperZips voted Republican in 2004. But they are indeed out of touch.

The have-a-nice-day stuff of Walmart in Germany went down like a lead Zeppelin with employees and shoppers alike.

Hopkins was the most flamboyant advertising genius of the early 20th century — the man who convinced millions of women to buy Palmolive soap on the basis that Cleopatra had washed with it, and got the world talking about puffed wheat with the claim that it was "shot from guns" until the grains puffed to eight times their normal size.

Every company starts out as a shell. Just £ 349 ($560) buys you a company in the Seychelles, with no local taxation, no public disclosure of directors or shareholders and no requirement to file accounts. Prices rise to £ 5,000 for more sophisticated corporate structures in places like Switzerland and Luxembourg. Two firms handle two-thirds of all Delaware companies: CT Corporation (part of Wolters Kluwer of the Netherlands) and CSC.

There is no limit to human ingenuity in finding new ways to go bust.

Before the crisis many central bankers believed that all they needed was a "hammer" (interest rates) to strike a "monetary nail" (consumer-price inflation). But not every problem is a nail. Policymakers also need a full set of "macroprudential" tools, from wrenches to duct tape E.

Mr Murray starts by lamenting the isolation of a new upper class, which he defines as the most successful 5% of adults (plus their spouses) work­ing in managerial positions, the professions or the senior media. These people are not only rich but also exceptionally clever, because America has become expert at sending its brightest to the same elite universities, where they intermarry and confer on their offspring not just wealth but also a cognitive advantage that gives this class terrific staying power.

The best time to invest is when there is blood in the streets.

In the 19th century Alexis de Tocqueville marvelled that in America the opulent did not stand aloof from the people. A great cultural gap sep­arates the elite from other Americans. They seldom watch "Oprah" or "Judge Judy" all the way through. In fact they do not watch much televi­sion at all. They eat in restaurants, but not often at Applebee's, Denny's or Waffle House, chains that cater to the common taste. They may take The Economist, with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and per­haps the New Yorker or Rolling Stone. They drink wine and boutique beers (and can discuss them expertly) but only in moderation, and they hardly ever smoke cigarettes.

Mr Icahn had expounded his theory of the moronisation of Amer­ican management. The typical chief executive, he said, to chuck­les, is "the guy you knew in college, the fraternity president — not too bright, back-slapping, but a survivor, politically astute, a nice guy". To be a chief executive, you need to know how not to tread on anyone's toes on the way up. You eventually become the number two, who "has got to be a little worse than the number one to survive". When the number two becomes chief executive, he promotes someone a little worse than him as his second-in- command. "It is the survival of the unfittest," concluded Mr Icahn. "Eventually we are all going to be run by morons."

Most students of taxation know the advice that Jean-Baptiste Colbert, treasurer to Louis XIV, offered the beleaguered taxman: pluck the goose so as to get the most feathers with the least hissing. But suppose the goose is housed on one farm, eats the birdseed scattered in a second, and lays its eggs in a third. Which farmer gets the plumage?

History offers perhaps only one true example of a reserve-cur­rency shift, from the British pound to the dollar. The pound was king during the era of the gold standard. But in the years after 1914, Britain switched from net creditor to net debtor, and by the 1920s the dollar was the only currency convertible to gold (al­though the pound returned to gold in 1925). Two costly wars and two episodes of currency devaluation in Britain later, the dollar was unchallenged as the world's chief reserve currency.

Americans used to believe that their constitution protected private prop­erty. The Fifth Amendment allows the state to seize it only for "public use", and so long as "just compensation" is paid. "Public use" has traditionally been taken to mean something like a public highway. Roads would ob­viously be much harder to build if a single homeowner could hold out forever or for excessive compensation. The government's powers of "emi­nent domain" have also been used to clean up "blighted" slums. "Urban renewal", he noted, has sometimes been nicknamed "negro removal".

The "triangular trade" as it was known, whereby slave-ships left European ports for west Africa with rum, guns, textiles and other goods to exchange for slaves, and then transported them across the Atlantic to sell to plantation-owners, and then returned with sugar and coffee, also fuelled the first great wave of economic globalisa­tion. Slavers in France would send their shirts to be washed in the streams of the Caribbean isle of St Domingue, now Haiti; the water there was said to whiten the linen better than any European stream.

The price of used furniture is nothing but a viewpoint, and if you wouldn't understand the viewpoint is impossible to understand the price. With used furniture you can't be emotional 49.

There is almost no house property in London that is not overbur­dened with a number of middlemen.

Although Britons are cross about high pay, few seek capitalism's over­throw: they dislike corporate fat cats for being fat, not for being cats.

Some firms are employing a "China + 1" strategy, opening just one factory in another country to test the waters and provide a back-up. If China's currency and shipping costs were to rise by 5% annually and wages were to go up by 30% a year, by 2015 it would be just as cheap to make things in North America as to make them in China and ship them there.

Mr Rao offered two deals on loose coffee beans: 33% extra free or 33% off the price. The discount is by far the better proposition, but the sup­posedly clever students viewed them as equivalent. Even well-educated shoppers are easily foxed.

If not in coin you must pay in humiliation of spirit for every ben­efit received at the hands of philanthropy.

When Deng Xiaoping, China's paramount leader, died in 1997 his only post was chairman of the China Bridge Association.

Shopping with coupons and jars of loose change. Watering down milk to make it go further. Using washing up liquid instead of shampoo. Inventing excuses for skipping lunch. Having to walk everywhere. Sharing beds and baths. Mending clothes that are themselves second-hand. Reviving old newspapers as makeshift lampshades. Always being tired — poverty in austerity.

The first is that entrepreneurs routinely see opportunities where every­one else sees problems. A surprising number of great companies were born out of fury and frustration.

When Wal-Mart tried to impose alien rules on its German staff — such as compulsory smiling and a ban on affairs with co-work­ers — it touched off a guerilla war that ended only when the super­market chain announced it was pulling out of Germany in 2006.

When things went wrong for Middle Eastern tribes a couple of millennia ago, the accepted remedy was to send a sacrificial goat out into the wil­derness to placate the gods. The practice continues today, but the voters have replaced the gods, and highly paid businesspeople the goats.

Why do Americans spend such huge amounts of time, money, water, fertiliser and fuel on growing a useless smooth expanse of grass? Much better to cultivate something useful, like tomatoes.

Walmart did not become a $200 billion company without running down a few pedestrians.

Water flows towards money.

The recovery has resembled third-world traffic, where juggernauts and rickshaws, cars and cycles ply the same lanes at different speeds, often getting in each other's way.

Shoppers have been able to buy from out-of-state merchants since Sears issued its first mail-order catalogues in the 19th century.

Warren Buffett: "It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked."

The new strategy looks more promising, but as always success will depend on implementation.

Consider an imaginary Englishman's day. He wakes in his cottage near Dover, ready to commute to London. Chomping a bowl of Weetabix, a British breakfast cereal resembling (tasty) cardboard, he makes a cup of tea. His privatised water comes from Veolia and his electricity from EDF (both French firms). Thumps at the gate tell him another arm of Veo- lia is emptying his bins. He takes the new high-speed train to London: it is part-owned by the French firm Keolis, while the tracks belong to Canadian pension funds. At St Pancras station, a choice of double-decker buses awaits. In the last couple of years, one of the big London bus com­panies was bought by Netherlands Railways. A second went to Deutsche Bahn, the German railway company. In March, a third was taken over by RATP, the Paris public-transport authority (its previous owners were also French). The Dutch railways logo is emblazoned on buses across London. Thanks to RATP's logo, a stylised image of the River Seine now adorns hundreds more: most Londoners neither know nor care. As for Weetabix, a French billionaire is interested in buying the firm, according to press reports. Yet Britain still feels British.

Polaroid, whose once-iconic instant-photo firm, has only one sig­nificant asset now — its name.

In a diatribe against the Rothschilds, Heinrich Heine, a German poet, fumed that money "is more fluid than water and less steady than air".

New boss didn't magic away the problems.

Most state-owned companies are prone to over-staffing, underinvest­ment, political interference and corruption.

Putting business at the heart of the health-care system is not a must but a bug.

The word "company" is derived from the Latin words "cum" and "pane" meaning "breaking bread together".

The sheer size of the Al Saud clan has also helped cement the na­tion. There have been eight generations of Saudi rulers, dating back to 18th-century sheikhs who held sway in a few oasis towns near present-day Riyadh. Many have been prolific. King Abdul Aziz himself sired some 36 sons and even more daughters. The first son to succeed him, King Saud, fathered 107 children. King Abdullah is believed to have 20 daughters and 14 sons. The ex­tended Al Saud family is now thought to number some 30,000, though only 7,000 or so are princes. Of these, only around 500 are in government, and only perhaps 60 carry real weight in de­cisionmaking.

There's no exaggerating China's hunger for commodities. The country accounts for about a fifth of the world's population, yet it gobbles up more than half of the world's pork, half of its cement, a third of its steel and over a quarter of its aluminium. It is spending 35 times as much on imports of soya beans and crude oil as it did in 1999, and 23 times as much importing copper — indeed, China has swallowed over four-fifths of the increase in the world's copper supply since 2000.

The world knows what it wants, but cannot agree on how to get what it wants.

The financial results of Chinese companies that global investors wish to buy into can be as unintelligible as the dialect spoken in the company town. It is said (with apparent sincerity) that some Chinese firms keep several sets of books — one for the government, one for company re­cords, one for foreigners and one to report what is actually going on.

Nokia must still work to keep its chin above the waves.

The problem is that as soon as fun becomes part of a corporate strategy it ceases to be fun and becomes its opposite — at best an empty shell and at worst a tiresome imposition.

Roads, railways, water and gas mains, sewage pipes and electric­ity cables all move things around. So do the blood vessels of ani­mals and the sap-carrying xylem and phloem of plants.

Beekeeping is one example beloved by economic theorists. Bees create honey, which can be sold on the market. But they also pollinate nearby apple trees, a useful service that is not purchased or priced.

The story of Ireland is like a fairy tale: from rags to riches and back to rags again.

The full-blooded, unapologetic pursuit of America's national interest.

The rich world is in the middle of a management revolution, from "motivation 2.0" to "motivation 3.0" (1.0 in this schema was pre­historic times, when people were motivated mainly by the fear of being eaten by wild animals).

Then there is "gladvertising" and "sadvertising", a rather sinister- sounding idea in which billboards with embedded cameras, linked to face-tracking software, detect the mood of each consumer who passes by, and change the advertising on display to suit it. The technology matches movements of the eyes and mouth to six expression patterns corresponding to happiness, anger, sadness, fear, surprise and disgust. An unhappy-looking person might be rewarded with ads for a sun­drenched beach or a luscious chocolate bar while those wearing an anxious frown might be reassured (some might say exploited) with an ad for insurance.

Romantics say that the bank used to prosper by deliberately not having any strategy at all.

China's leaders hew to Deng Xiaoping's dictum that "China should adopt a low profile and never take the lead." China can hide its national de­mands behind a multilateral facade.

PepsiCo announced that it had developed the world's first bottle to be made entirely of a plastic consisting of plant-based materi­als, which can be fully recycled. Its "green bottle" is composed of switch grass, pine bark and corn husk. Pepsi hopes to produce bottles in the future using orange and potato peels and other by­products from food.

Saudi oil costs just $2 a barrel to produce, a small fraction of what it costs to extract the stuff in Alaska, say, or the North Sea. Demand from both Asia and America remains strong. Saudi Aramco, the giant state oil monopoly, is ramping up its production capacity. Having remained static at around 10m barrels per day for a generation, this is currently pushing 11m and may reach 12.5m by 2009 and perhaps 15m by 2015. Assuming a middle-of- the-range price of around $40 a barrel, the oil bubbling out of the ground could continue to be worth around $500m a day for many years to come. Oil exports, having bottomed out in 1998 at $35 billion, have since soared, hitting a record $160 billion in 2005. Last year's current-account surplus was close to $100 billion and the central bank's net foreign reserves rose to $135 billion, a jump of $90 billion in just three years.

A firm and an industry that had become accustomed to obscurity will have to get used to the limelight.

Mr Hayward set out to replace flash and fluff with nuts and bolts.

London, once a blue-blooded cocoon.

China is quite open to yarn, but not jerseys, diamonds, but not jewelry.

Public transport in Los Angeles has a great future, and always will.

Mr Toyoda had been reading "How the Mighty Fall", a book by Jim Col­lins, an American management guru. In it, Mr Collins (best known for an earlier, more upbeat work, "Good to Great") describes the five stages through which a proud and thriving company passes on its way to be­coming a basket-case. First comes hubris born of success; second, the undisciplined pursuit of more; third, denial of risk and peril; fourth, grasping for salvation; and last, capitulation to irrelevance or death.

There are lots of other jobs that aren't real. Designing a new plas­tic soapbox, making pokerwork jokes for public-houses, writing advertising slogans, being an MP, talking to UNESCO conferences. But the money's real work.

In theory, the case for joint ventures was compelling. The foreign partner provided capital, knowledge, access to international markets and jobs. The Chinese partner provided access to cheap labour, local regulatory knowledge and access to what used to be a relatively unimportant do­mestic market. The Chinese government protected swathes of the econ­omy from acquisitions, but provided land, tax breaks and at least the appearance of a welcome to attract investment. "For a joint venture to be successful," says Jonathan Woetzel of McKinsey, a consultancy, "you have to plan for it to die".

He was waltzing from job to job.

China is full of small and medium-sized companies that have fingers in many pies, taking advantage of opportunities as they arise.

In Britain there's London, London and London. In America there are scores of hubs.

The food stamps participation has soared since the recession began). By April 2010 it had reached almost 45m, or one in seven Americans. The cost, naturally, has soared too, from $35 billion in 2008 to $65 billion last year. Only those with incomes of 130% of the poverty level or less are eligible for them. The amount each person receives depends on their income, assets and family size, but the average benefit is $133 a month and the maximum, for an individual with no income at all, is $200. Those sums are due to fall soon, when a temporary boost expires. Even the current package is meagre. Melissa Nieves, a recipient in New York, says she compares costs at five different supermarkets, assiduously collects coupons, eats mainly cheap, starchy foods, and still runs out of money a week or ten days before the end of the month.

Business people are fond of accusing business academics of be­ing all mouth and no trousers (if the accusers are British) or all hat and no cattle (if they are Texan).

The ultimatum they received from euro-zone leaders at the G20 summit in Cannes to reform their economies — or else.

In a country where oil cash still enhances the allure of office, can only spell turbulent times ahead.

In 1500 Europe's future imperial powers controlled 10% of the world's territories and generated just over 40% of its wealth. By 1913, at the height of empire, the West controlled almost 60% of the territories, which together generated almost 80% of the wealth.

In Central Asia the most successful companies are sinecures of nepotism.

Insurance is banking's boring cousin: it lacks the glamour, the sky-high bonuses and the ever-present whiff of danger.

Fill up an SUV's fuel tank with ethanol and you have used enough maize to feed a person for a year.

Foundations were laid timber by timber, railway sleeper by railway sleeper.

Germany's hyperinflation in 1923 — it became cheaper to burn banknotes than to buy fuel.

Corruption is often blamed on plata o plomo — meaning silver or lead, bribes or threats.

Global business has been rocked by crises, from Enron to the fi­nancial meltdown. Harvard Business School (HBS), alas, played a role. Enron was stuffed with HBS old boys, from the chief execu­tive, Jeff Skilling, downward. The school wrote a sheaf of lauda­tory case studies about the company. Many of the bankers who recently mugged the world's taxpayers were HBS men.

Hayward is in the meat grinder of public opprobrium along with Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, and Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota.

Contrary to popular belief, traffic in Atlanta is not always hellish. There are a good few days each year when it is merely purgato­rial.

Consumer spending accounts for about 70% of U.S. economic activity.

Sin taxes have a long history as a fiscal wheeze: Parliament first introduced levies on beer and meat in 1643 to finance its fight against the Crown. Levies on alcohol have persisted: tax is now around 53p on a pint of beer, £ 2.18 per bottle of wine and £ 8.54 on a bottle of whisky. Tobacco was originally taxed as an imported luxury; today, duty on cigarettes accounts for about three-quar­ters of the price of a packet of cigarettes. Laziness is a harder sin to target, but one weapon against it is fuel duty: 23% of car jour­neys are of less than two miles, so walking or cycling are rea­sonable alternatives for at least some trips. Fuel taxes also target a greater ill — the exhaust fumes that contribute to global warm­ing. Tax, including VAT, accounts for 63% of the price of petrol.

As the old saw has it, they tax neither you nor me but the man behind the tree.

Brazil's brief recession of 2009 was a fall onto a trampoline.

Several other countries show evidence of what might be dubbed the "DOG factor": a discount for obnoxious governments. Iran, like Russia a target of Western sanctions, trades on a p/e of just 5.6 and has a total stockmarket value of $131 billion; were it to be rated on a par with the average emerg­ing market, its market value would be $292 billion, so its DOG factor is $161 billion or 55%. One trillion dollars. That may be the cost to Russian investors of Vladimir Putin's rule. It is the equivalent of about $7,000 for every Russian citizen. The calculation stems from the fact that investors regard Russian assets with suspicion. As a result, Russian stocks trade on a huge discount to much of the rest of the world, with an average price- earnings ratio (p/e) of just 5.2. At present, the Russian market has a total value of $735 billion. If it traded on the same p/e as the average emerging market (12.5), it would be worth around $1.77 trillion.

Humanity spends over 1 trillion minutes a month on mobiles or nearly 2 million years.

All it takes to be a photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson once said, is "one finger, one eye and two legs".

A psychiatrist argues that companies display all the character­istics of a psychopath: callous disregard for others' feelings, in­ability to maintain relationships, a willingness to bend any rule

and break any law if it advances their interests, and an obsession with amassing power and money.

As Bob Monks, a shareholder activist, puts it, "the American shareholder cannot nominate directors, he cannot remove them, he cannot — except at the arbitrary pleasure of the SEC — communicate advice to them. De­mocracy is a cruelly misleading word to describe the situation of the American shareholder in 2006."

Across a vast continent a "westering" people established the no- vus ordo seclorum that is on every dollar bill.

Cuba is the only country in the world where it is not necessary to work — the country can no longer afford this.

How can you spot the venture capitalists at a business confer­ence? They're the people who are always hunting for the exits.

In George Orwell's "Animal Farm" the mighty cart-horse, Boxer, inspires the other animals with his heroic cry of "I will work harder". He gets up at the crack of dawn to do a couple of hours' extra ploughing. He even re­fuses to take a day off when he splits his hoof. And his reward for all this effort? As soon as he collapses on the job he is carted off to the knacker's yard to be turned into glue and bonemeal.

"The bad news is we didn't hit oil," ran the old wildcatter's joke. 'The good news is we didn't find gas."

Capitalism can make you well off. And it also leaves you free to be as unhappy as you choose. To ask any more of it would be asking too much.

Investors who believe in the beta mousetrap may find that the rodents have already escaped with the cheese.

The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each ac­cording to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gul­libility, to each according to his greed.

The American dream: a big car, a big house and Big Macs far all.

No one knows what future volatility will be.

£ £ Food, wine, fun, joy, pleasure, luck, beauty, happiness

Asked if anything interrupted his sleep, Helmut Kohl said it was night­time forays to the fridge.

In 1755 Samuel Johnson's dictionary defined oats as "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people".

They harvest the apples by cutting the tree branches.

Players of Pokemon Go have collectively walked nearly 9bn kilo­metres since the smartphone game was released last year.

I want tequila and dancing and girls and democracy.

The tea that was thrown into Boston harbour in 1773 had come from Xiamen.

Since the early 2000s the number of deaths north of the border has plunged, bringing Scotland within spitting (or perhaps vomiting) dis­tance of its neighbours.

Research has also shown what happens inside our brains when we make decisions. Winning money has the same effect on a brain as a cocaine addict getting a fix, while losing money has the same effect on risk-averse people as a nasty smell or pictures of bodily mutilation.

Humans are not the only species to enjoy a snifter. Myriad experiments on other animals, from rats and monkeys to bees and fruit flies, show that they also get drunk, will seek out alcohol given the opportunity and may even develop a dependence on the stuff.

The pseudo-Palaeolithic diet the two researchers chose com­prised beets, carrots and yams as root vegetables, and goat as meat. They prepared the vegetables four ways: raw and unpro­cessed; raw and hit six times with a copy of a Palaeolithic ham- merstone; raw and cut into small slices; and roasted for 15 minu­tes. The goat was also served four ways: raw and unprocessed;

raw and pounded 50 times by a hammerstone; raw and cut into small slices; and cooked on a grill for 25 minutes.

Convening a conference supporting antitrust concerns in the Windy City was like holding a symposium on sobriety in New Orleans.

People are predisposed to think that things are worse than they are, and they overestimate the likelihood of calamity. This is be­cause they rely not on data, but on how easy it is to recall an ex­ample. And bad things are more memorable. The media amplify this distortion. Famines, earthquakes and beheadings all make gripping headlines; "40m Planes Landed Safely Last Year" does not.

If the Italians don't bring pasta and the French don't bring pate, you can't complain about Mrs Merkel's cabbage soup.

French farmers use more chemicals than anyone else in Europe: 65,000 tonnes of pesticides alone each year.

Coffee moved in the opposite direction. From Ethiopia it was dissemi­nated throughout the Middle East by Arab traders during the 6th century and ultimately arrived in the New World during the 18th century, where nascent Americans may have seen drinking it as something of a patriotic duty after the Boston Tea Party.

Handlers are said to squeeze lemon in their eyes, rub chili on their genitals or force alcohol down their throats — whatever it takes to drive a bull wild enough to charge into a pen ringed with cheering, jeering people.

Cane accounts for four-fifths of global sugar production, but only one- fifth of Europe's. Most of the continent's sugar is made from beet, thanks to a technique developed in the Napoleonic wars, when an English block­ade hit French cane-sugar imports.

All houseguests are said to bring pleasure: some when they ar­rive, others when they leave.

One answer to the question, "What ate dinosaurs?" is, obviously, "Other dinosaurs."

Lewis Carroll, no mean mathematician himself, asked Alice to be­lieve as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

So central is rice to life in Asia that in many countries, rather than asking "how are you?" people ask, "have you eaten rice yet?"

Chirac about the British: "You can't trust people who have such terrible food."

As Winston Churchill once said, "This pudding has no theme."

James Bond, meanwhile, detects a spy on a sleeper train after no­ticing him behave suspiciously in the dining car ("Red wine with fish!" Bond mutters).

It's the second mouse that gets the cheese.

Benjamin Franklin is said (probably apocryphally) to have called beer "proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy".

He who holds the honey is bound to lick his fingers.

Mark Twain: "Whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting over."

One of Samsung's smart fridges, with cameras within that check for rotting food and enable consumers to see what they are short of while shopping (through an app on their phone), sells for a cool $5,000.

Hwahae, a cosmetics-reviewing app launched in 2013 (by three men who wanted to know what exactly was in their facial pro­ducts) has already clocked up 2.5m downloads. It lets consumers read up on 1.9m ingredients in 62,000 items. It is always good to know what you are rubbing on your face.

Much of life is made of small, modest pleasures (tasty mints, starry nights) and tiny tragedies (an errant comment, an uncomfortable shoe).

Congress is as popular as a porcupine in a bag of popcorn.

The juice is no longer worth the squeeze.

The parsley on the fish can make the difference between a deli­cious meal and a dog's dinner.

Of all these edible platters, it is pizza that has become the world's fa­vourite fast food, plain dough onto which each country bakes its own flavours: mussels in the Netherlands, Teriyaki chicken and seaweed in Japan. Born in Naples, the modern pizza was the poor man's meal. One 19th-century American visitor, Samuel Morse (inventor of the telegraph), thought it "like a piece of bread that had been taken reeking out of the sewer". For Alexandre Dumas, it was "the gastronomic thermometer of the market": if fish pizza was cheap, there had been a good catch; if oil pizza was dear, there had been a bad olive harvest.

The only good Mexico has ever done for wine is to send grape pickers to Napa Valley.

It's like living in a loaf of Wonder Bread.

The "cooking paradox": why it is that people now spend less time preparing food from scratch and more time reading about cook­ing or watching cookery programmes on television?

Is pig farming a strategic industry? Keeping down the price of a barbe­cue is a matter of national security.

The best-known test is the "marshmallow" experiment, in which children who could refrain from eating the confection for 15 mi­nutes were given a second one. Children who could not wait tended to have lower incomes and poorer health as adults. New

research suggests that kids who are unable to delay rewards are also more likely to become criminals later.

Titus Andronicus avenged himself on the barbarian queen Tamora by murdering her sons and serving them up to her in a pie. European food manufacturers did nothing so dreadful when they sold horse as beef in burgers and lasagne. Horsemeat is not dangerous.

One of the undersold boons of the internet is that it functions a bit like a permanent, rolling global coffee break.

One way to make a traveller smile is to go to Intercourse, Pennsylvania, which is about half way between Blue Ball and Paradise.

In 1937 George Orwell suggested that "changes of diet" might be more important than "changes of dynasty or even of religion".

Only the drunk, they say, drive in a straight line in Chicago. The sober zigzag to avoid falling into the city's axle-breaking potholes.

"A good neighbour lends you a cup of sugar," read an ad in the Washington Post last month. "A great neighbour supplies you with 1.4 million barrels of oil a day."

Weeds like dandelions which you can find all over the world and which nobody really gives a second glance to are the happiest.

If yogurt is strategic for the French, olive oil has the same exalted status in Spain.

By tradition a British butcher is a jolly chap; and few could be jollier than

a man whose life was devoted, first, to making the perfect sausage, and, second, to matching it with the perfect foaming pint.

In Arthur Miller's 1949 play "Death of a Salesman", Happy's dream was a simple one: "My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women."

Early Hindu mythology held that pearls were made from dewdrops that the pearl mollusc absorbed when it rose to the surface of the sea at night to breathe.

Roquefort, camembert, brie de Meaux, Saint-Felicien, gruyere, comte, munster, pont l'eveque, cantal, reblochon, tomme de Savoie, crottin de chavignol. A spontaneous familiarity with the display on a three-tier cheese trolley is essential to the national identity of the French.

The Chinese love pork and as their incomes soar they want it more than ever. A domestic herd of 476m pigs, around half of the global pig popula­tion, already seems insufficient; China has been a net importer of pork since 2008.

Wisconsin state law prohibits selling milk to the public without pasteurising it first. But Mr Hershberger tried to get around this stricture by setting up a "club" which provided raw milk (also known as "moo-shine") to its members — until state food inspec­tors raided his farm, destroyed the milk they found and put him on trial.

Most Britons would rather eat scorpions rather than Hershey bars. There is a large Greek fly in the ointment.

Spain is the Saudi Arabia of olive oil, accounting for nearly half of global production.

California has been eating its "seed corn".

Recipes are like flying buttresses, you find out whether they work only by trying them out: no souffled sandwiches, no Chartres cathedral.

As Mrs Obama writes in her new book, "American Grown", not since Eleanor Roosevelt's victory garden during the second world war had anyone grown food on the White House lawn. And what a garden it is. Pak choi in springtime! Tomatillos in the summer! Seventy thousand bees producing hundreds of pounds of honey to donate to local homeless shelters and give to "visiting dignitar­ies and heads of state"!

Ataturk's aphorism: "Happy is he who calls himself a Turk."

Louis XIII cognac is a blend of up to 1200 different eaux-de-vie aged between 40 and 100 years old and the prices are starting from $1.500 — to $40.000 for a magnum of the Black Pearl edi­tion.

In making cookies, does the use of butter or margarine affect the size of the cookie?

France's tradition of making exquisite luxuries dates back at least to the court of Louis XIV. The sun king financed ebenistes (ca­binet-makers), tapisseurs (upholsterers), menuisiers (carpenters) and other artisans who made beautiful and largely useless things for the court of Versailles. Bernard Arnault might be his heir.

Cases of Westvleteren 12, on sale at 39 ($53) at the Trappist Abbey of St Sixtus of Westvleteren, turn up on online beer-sellers for as much as $800. (In a rare easing of the rules, in November the monks released a batch of 93,000 six-packs for the Belgian market, to pay for repairs to the abbey. Next year 70,000 six-packs will go on sale worldwide.) Beer is to Belgium as wine is to France.

Johnnie Walker's labels make it abundantly clear how much a customer has spent. Red Label is the cheapest. Black is pricier, followed by Green, Gold and Blue. Beyond Blue is King George V, which sells for more than $500 a bottle. Criminals in South Africa buy it to prove they are successful criminals. The ruling class in Angola is another promising market.

How in God's name can I tell the difference between Scotch and Bour­bon? They are all bottles, aren't they?

No one likes to think about who was in their hotel room before them, let alone what they got up to. The best to hope for is that your lodgings are clean and hygienic. But are they? The TV remote control and the bedside- lamp switch are among the most contaminated.

When in a party mood, who trusts the Party?

If you are going to use GPS to take you to a location, sonar to identify the fish and a lure which reflects light that humans can't even see, you may as well just go to McDonald's and order a fish sandwich.

The conversation of the French salons and dinner tables became as stylised as a ballet. The basic skills brought to the table were expected to include politesse (sincere good manners), esprit (wit), galanterie (gallantry), complaisance (obligingness), enjouement (cheerfulness) and flatterie. More specific techniques would be required as the conversation took flight. A comic mood would re­quire displays of raillerie (playful teasing), plaisanterie (joking), bons mots (epigrams), traits and pointes (rhetorical figures in­volving "subtle, unexpected wit", according to Benedetta Craveri, a historian of the period), and, later, persiflage (mocking under the guise of praising). Even silences had to be finely judged. The Duc de La Rochefoucauld distinguished between an "eloquent" si­lence, a "mocking" silence and a "respectful" silence. The mastery of such "airs and tones", he said, was "granted to few".

The results, to be published in Evolution and Human Behaviour, show that the men and women collected on average about the same weight of mushrooms. But the men travelled farther, climbed higher and used a lot more energy-70% more than the women. The men did not move any faster, but they searched for spots with lots of mushrooms.

Greenland sharks cannot help but capture the imagination. These primeval inhabitants of the deep, icy waters of the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans can live to 400, possibly even 500 years old, are cigar shaped, and often have worm-like parasites on their lu­minous eyes that are said to hypnotise their prey. Their bodies are covered with razor-like "skin teeth" and their meat contains a toxin; people who eat it start to hallucinate, become incoherent and stagger around, becoming "shark drunk".

The economists of his day took their cue from Jeremy Bentham and his "utilitarian" philosophy. They calculated happiness, or utility, as the sum of good feelings minus bad, and argued that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain were the sole springs of human action. One even looked forward to the invention of a hedonimeter, a "psychophysical ma­chine" that would record the ups and downs of a man's feelings just as a thermometer might plot his temperature. Such people, Carlyle com­plained, fancied that man was a "dead Iron-Balance for weighing Pains and Pleasures on".

Botox was used 336,834 times by American men in 2010, up 9% from 2009, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. But women are still 15 times more likely than men to have their faces frozen.

I'm on a seafood diet — I see food and I eat it.

As anyone who has been to Japan knows, there are strict rules about bathing in onsen, or hot springs. Bodies must be scrubbed beforehand, swimming trunks are banned and tattoos are taboo.

He is a pescatarian, i.e. a vegetarian who eats fish.

More voters come to believe that Fidesz and its friends, just like their Socialist predecessors, have carved up Hungary among themselves as if it were a giant salami.

In ancient China suspected liars were sometimes required to hold rice in their mouths while their alleged misdemeanours were read out. A dry mouth was thought to be a symptom of a guilty conscience, so subsequent examination of the rice offered an easy indication as to innocence or guilt. The idea that lying produces physical symptoms found its modern expres­sion in America in the early 20th century, with the invention of the poly­graph, the "lie detector" so beloved of spy films and pulp detective novels.

Demand for lobsters, for example, has evolved in a curious way. The armour-plated delicacy used to be super-abundant and dirt cheap, he says — so cheap that it was fed to inmates in prison and children in orphanages. Farmers even fertilised their fields with it, and servants would bargain with their employers to be given it no more than twice or thrice a week.

Oxfam, an aid agency, warns of a humanitarian disaster, with more than 1m children facing severe malnutrition. Villagers in Chad already dig up ant hills to gather grain the ants have stored.

All that glisters is not gadolinium.

Champagne socialism.

The euphemism now lies buried beneath the rubble of reality.

Starbucks provides a comfortable environment, at considerable ex­pense, so that people will buy overpriced coffee.

The main factor sleparating success and failure of great strate­gies is luck.

The food was good, but not the mood.

This combination of challenges and opportunities is producing a fizzing cocktail of creativity.

The British have embraced the Liberal Democrats, lampooned not so long ago as gently eccentric granola-eaters and sandal-wearers.

Sparkling wines does not appear to work in stouts.

Useless as a chocolate teapot.

In the world of wine (regarded as an art form by at least some connoisseurs), being told the price of a bottle affects a drinker's appreciation of the liquid in the glass in ways that can be detected by a brain scanner.

Surely you know what a blue-plate is, man? They shove the whole meat at you under your nose, already dished up on your plate — roast tur­key, cranberry sauce, sausages and carrots and Grench fried. I can't bear French fried, but there's no pick and choose with a blue-plate.

But one constant would remain through all of this fuss about whether Marmite is vegetarian, or baked beans kosher or halal.

Charles de Gaulle once said that the graveyards are full of indispensable men. The same can be said of the bars of Los Angeles and Paris.

in 1795 Napoleon offered a prize to preserve food for his army, which led to the canned food of today.

Indeed, there are enough sour grapes in these pages to fill an entire vine­yard.

If you use a public toilet and it's dirty, clean it, otherwise those who come after you will think you dirtied it.

It takes roughly 3,000 litres of water to grow enough food for one person for one day, or about one litre for each calorie. Don't paint a snake with legs, the Chinese will say, when someone is in danger of spoiling some­thing by overdoing it.

But the last word on Steve Irwin seemed to belong to Africa's greatest crocodile-hunter, Khalid Hassen, bagger of 17,000 crocs the easy way, with a rifle, who said it simply didn't seem right that a fish should have killed him.

"We say it is higher than the mountains, deeper than the oceans, stronger than steel, dearer than eyesight, sweeter than honey, and so on."

Even where there is enough food, people do not seem healthier. On top of 1 billion without enough calories, another 1 billion are malnourished in the sense that they lack micro-nutrients (this is often called "hidden hunger"). And a further 1 billion are mal­nourished in the sense that they eat too much and are obese. It is a damning record: out of the world population of 7 billion, 3 bil­lion eat too little, too unhealthily, or too much.

The connection between humour and Jews is so strong as to be almost axiomatic and it as similar to "French cuisine" or "Turkish baths".

George Bernard Shaw once wrote: "There is no love sincerer than the love of food."

In his "Autobiography John Stuart Mill argued that the best way to at­tain happiness is not to make happiness your "direct end", but to fix your mind on something else. Happiness is the incidental by-product of pur­suing some other worthy goal.

Around 15,400 tonnes a year, a whopping 80% of all antibiotics sold, go to farmers. Chicken farmers use even more than those who raise cattle or pigs. Only a small percentage of the drugs are used to cure illnesses.

Women aged 25-44 spend almost as much time shopping as they do eat­ing and drinking.

You never expected Nelson Mandela or Gandhi to dress smartly.

£ £ Government, politics, democracy, society

If politicians were recyclable, they'd be worth less than cardboard.

Many moons ago Lyndon Johnson was widely quoted as justify­ing his unwillingness to sack J. Edgar Hoover as the head of the FBI, on the ground that "it's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in".

"If you look into the crystal ball," says an experienced pollster, "you've got to be ready to eat ground glass." Some put Hillary Clinton's chance of victory against Mr Trump above 99%.

One quick question: do you know what a mugwump is?

Was the American Revolution not a civil war within the British empire?

The first rule of politics: don't kick your most faithful voters in the teeth for no reason.

Nobody reads party manifestos.

A figure of between 100 and 200 acquaintances is similar to the number of people with whom a human being can maintain a meaningful social relationship — a value known as Dunbar's number, after Robin Dunbar, the psychologist who proposed it. Dunbar's number for people is about 150.

This has encouraged a notion that the nominees are as bad as each other — Hillary and Trump are Coke and Pepsi, both bad for you.

The proportion of Britons telling pollsters that they almost never trust the government has risen from one in ten in 1986 to one in three today.

A more open, accessible imperial family has transformed the monarchy's appeal after the aloofness of Hirohito — even if it will be a while yet before the royals bicycle to the supermarket like Scandinavian ones.

Imagine an American election in which two-thirds of the senators and three-quarters of the state governors up for re-election are defeated. It would be a landside to end all landslides.

The whole purpose of having a drawbridge is that one can raise or lower it as necessary depending upon the situation at hand. A proper castle requires a sensible fellow at the controls.

Donald Rumsfeld, a former American defence secretary, once delight­ed policy wonks everywhere by distinguishing between "known un­knowns" — things we know we don't know — and "unknown unknowns". China's political system is a known unknown.

"When the end of the world is nigh," Otto von Bismarck allegedly said, "I will move to Mecklenburg, because everything happens 50 years later there." Even locals agree that the north-eastern state of Mecklenburg — West Pomerania will always be a back­water. But backwaters can also be bellwethers.

It feels as if Britain has been visited by a battalion of sorrows.

When Richard Nixon got cross with Gough Whitlam, the inde­pendent-minded Australian prime minister at the time, he put Australia on his "shit list".

There is a saying in Japan that a monkey that falls from a tree is still a monkey, but a member of parliament who falls is a nobody.

Some legal scholars have, rather valiantly, cited as precedent Benjamin Franklin's seeking Congress's approval before accept­ing a jewel-encrusted snuffbox from the king of France as a re­tirement gift.

America already spends $19bn a year on immigration enforcement, more than on the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Drug Enforcement Agency and Secret Service combined.

The farther you live from a railway station, the more you are like­ly to vote FN (National Front).

Governments that were digitally blind when the internet first took off in the mid-1990s now have both a telescope and a microscope.

Multiplying parties can allow politicians to hide the fact that what matters is patronage. Voters may be bewildered when con­fronted with the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front — or with National Liberals, Democratic Liberals and Li­beral Reformists, as they were in Romania in 2014.

The US prison system that, after decades of relentless growth, holds over 20% of the world's prisoners, though America is home to less than 5% of the global population. Every year, 600,000 people are released from American prisons. More than half of all prisoners have mental health problems, while about two-thirds did not complete high school. Once out, ex-cons join about 70m Americans with criminal records, a status which in several states will deny them public housing and the right to vote, and legally bar them from occupations which require a licence, such as hair-cutting or plumbing.

During the 20th century, a ghastly illness was almost a presidential prerequisite. Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke in his second term that his doctors concealed; Franklin Roosevelt's heart problems killed him while in office; John F. Kennedy's ailments could have filled an entire medical textbook, had they been disclosed. Richard Nixon's anguish during Watergate placed a large nuclear arsenal in the hands of a president who may temporarily have been of un­sound mind. For the combination of sheer agony and high secrecy, though, it is hard to beat the unfortunate Grover Cleveland. For four days at the beginning of his second term, notes Robert Dallek of Stanford University's outpost in Washington, DC, he disappeared to a yacht, where six surgeons cut out a portion of his cancerous upper jaw. The offending bits were removed through his mouth so as not to damage his moustache, which might alert the public.

Frederick the Great of Prussia declared: "No woman should ever be al­lowed to govern anything."

As Queen Elizabeth nears 90 after 64 years as its titular head, some wonder if the Commonwealth club will survive when she goes. Few knew much about it; a quarter of Jamaicans thought its head was Barack Obama.

Roughly one adult Chinese in every 13 is a member of the Communist Party, yet identifying such people can be difficult.

Mobutu Sese Seko, the late dictator of Zaire, used to reshuffle his cabinet every six months or so to show ministers who was boss. To reinforce the point, he sometimes also slept with their wives.

Excuse me, Mr. President, but you are an asshole.

Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, has a name that is about as Scottish as a Dorset cream tea.

No Congress has ever moved to dislodge a president of the same party as its majority tribe.

The Israeli government recently raised an interesting question for advertisers: whom can you safely insult?

Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant, advised Republicans to use words like "liberal", "sick", "corrupf and "traitors" together, to tarnish the De­mocrats.

In London you've always had the Africans at the bottom of the pile along with the West Indians. Then you get some Afghans. Then the eastern Europeans coming up. Then you get the Asians. Then you get the Irish. Then you get the whites. And at the very top you get the rich. Where there is no race.

Bill de Blasio, New York's mayor, was asked whether transgender wo­men were allowed to swim during female-only hours. He had no quick answer. That, he said, is under review.

Parliamentary committees are normally sleepy affairs.

Queens, the researchers found, were more likely to gain new territory. After overthrowing her husband, Catherine the Great expanded her em­pire by some 200,000 square miles (518,000 sq km), which is a lot of terri­tory, even for Russia. (She was the first, though not the last, Russian ruler to annex Crimea.) And married queens were more aggressive than single queens or kings, whether single or married.

The upper chamber is the nation's biggest and most successful Laundromat.

This country is not working for working people. It's working only for those at the top. That's not the American dream. That's the American nightmare.

In Britain the elected House of Commons is less effective than the unelected House of Lords.

The world knows what it wants, but cannot agree on how to get what it wants.

Even the government cannot do much if it does not rain.

Fifty years later, black America still fares badly on many of the predic­tors of success and signals of distress that concerned Moynihan. If it were a separate country, it would have a worse life expectancy than Mexico, a worse homicide rate than Ivory Coast and a higher proportion of its citizens behind bars than anywhere on earth. This is despite the fact that, overall, America is home to the richest, most successful popu­lation of black African descent that the world has ever seen.

The distance between the front benches in Britain's House of Commons, it is said, is that of two drawn swords.

"The weather is like the government," wrote Jerome K. Jerome, "always in the wrong."

Asked how political coalitions are formed, Germany's chancel­lor, Gerhard Schroder, once shot back with a question of his own: "How do porcupines mate?" After a short pause, he then answered it with a grin: "Very slowly."

If town meeting teaches anything, it is how to suffer damn fools and to appreciate the fact that from time to time you too may look like a damn fool in the eyes of people as good as yourself.

If Democrats had any brains, they'd be Republicans.

"Political language," wrote George Orwell, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

Recep Erdogan is, as an old Turkish saying goes, holding a stick with shit at both ends.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency, which created the internet's forebear, ARPANET, was President Eisenhower's response to the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union. The decentralised, packet-based sys­tem of communication that forms the basis of the internet originated in America's need to withstand a massive attack on its soil.

Israel's founder reckoned that a nation "has to have its own bur­glars and prostitutes".

This great crappiness was essentially American.

Britain's queen has over the years received "pineapples, eggs, a box of snail shells, a grove of maple trees, a dozen tins of tuna and 7kg of prawns". Presumably they went the same way as the pair of cowboy boots she was given on a visit to America two decades ago.

Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk capacity.

Any man who is under 30 and is not a liberal has no heart; and any man who is over 30 and is not a conservative has no brains (Winston Churchill).

Nationalist protesters recently donned panda outfits to remind David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister, that there are more pandas in Edinburgh zoo (two) than there are Tory MPs in Scotland (one).

Is it a bad thing to have MPs voting for what they think is right?

The United States has taken Abraham Lincoln's admonition to heart: its constitution has been amended several times since coming into effect in 1789, but never replaced.

The world's countries no longer resemble "a flotilla of more than 100 separate boats"; rather, "they all live in 193 separate cabins on the same boat".

Sir Malcolm Jack, a former clerk of the Commons, was asked why the ca­tering services of the House of Lords, the upper house, and the House of Commons could not have been merged to save money. He replied: "The lords feared that the quality of champagne would not be as good if they chose a joint service." According to The Guardian newspaper, the upper house has spent £ 265,770 on 17,000 bottles of the stuff since the Con­servative-Liberal Democrat coalition government took office in 2010 — enough for five bottles of bubbly per peer per year.

Using "farmer" to mean "stupid" is unwise in Iowa, where the word is synonymous with "voter".

Mr Clegg is Westminster roadkill; his net personal approval rating is mi­nus 52.

One of Pol Pot's favourite sayings was, tuk min chamnen, dak chenh ka, min kat — "to keep you is no gain, to kill you no loss".

Arguably, the Founding Fathers favored a system in which one foot stayed permanently on the accelerator and the other on the brake. Hasn't America got what they wanted?

We're all Americuns, greatest race in the world!

Letting in dynamic immigrants, revamping the tax code and reforming entitlements would make the Great Society safe for another generation. Not enough to get Mr Obama's face carved on Mount Rushmore, but not bad.

Jurgen Habermas, the German philosopher who thought up the concept of the "public sphere", has always been in two minds about the internet. Digital communication, he wrote a few years ago, has unequivocal democratic merits only in authoritarian countries, where it undermines the government's information monopoly. Yet in liberal regimes, online media, with their mil­lions of forums for debate on a vast range of topics, could lead to a "fragmentation of the public" and a "liquefaction of politics", which would be harmful to democracy.

Being Republican, and thus not having a heart, saved his life when he got shot in the chest once.

One of the most popular sports in Washington is the partisan flip.

If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.

North Korea is the world's most rational despotic regime: a high­ly successful Communist absolute monarchy.

Bushism is Reaganism minus the passion for freedom.

For all its faults socialism is manifestly superior to capitalism in one area: the making of myths.

Every nation knows what is right and how everyone else is wrong.

Romania, a country where governments have the longevity of mayflies.

The queen understands that she is a symbol, and that symbols are "bet­ter off mostly keeping quiet".

Three highly dysfunctional institutions: the state of California, the European Union and the G20.

Leticia Van de Putte, a Texas state senator from San Antonio with rela­tives on both sides of the border, points out that "our family was there when it was Spain, when it was France, when it was Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, the Confederacy. Our family's always been in the same place; it was the damn government that kept changing."

Abraham Lincoln observed that "nearly all men can stand adver­sity but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."

The Newark mayor has long been a man of action. He once chased down a robbery suspect. He shovelled snow during a 2010 blizzard. In April he suffered burns when rescuing a neighbour from her burning house. Earlier this month he directed traffic away from an accident he came across.

For many years Northern Ireland was a large net importer of ad­vice on how to end its troubles.

Neanderthal dictatorship.

The prime minister should stop being the custodian of vaginas.

It could almost be a question in a political-science exam. Three groups, A, B and C each lack the necessary parliamentary majority; A will not form a coalition with B; C will not support either. How do you form a government.

Short of taking bribes or fornicating in a public park, there is no surer way to detonate a career in British politics than to accept a job as home secretary.

A cartoon of a fully clothed, bespectacled Mr Zuma, virtually unrecog­nisable save for the characteristic bump at the back of his shaven head, in a heroic Leninesque pose, but with his genitals hanging out of his trousers.

Joe Biden, the American vice-president, stood beside Mr Hol- lande in Paris and applauded his "decisiveness" and "the incred­ible competence and capability" of France's military forces. For a politician whom members of his own party compared vari­ously to a marshmallow, a woodland strawberry and a caramel pudding, this was bliss indeed.

In a short story called "Franchise", Isaac Asimov dreamed up a computer that saved Americans from going to the polls. The machine was fed data, and interviewed one representative voter, before announcing a result that perfectly reflected what would have happened had the election been held.

Mr Obama's problems were partly structural. An incumbent must defend the realities and compromises of government, while a challenger is freer to promise the earth, details to follow.

Old regimes fall to revolutions not when they resist change, but when they attempt reform yet dash the raised expectations they have evoked.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

George Bush senior picked Dan Quayle, whom many treated harshly as a figure of fun who could not spell "potato".

The Senate, so George Washington is reputed to have told Thom­as Jefferson, is a saucer into which legislation is poured to cool it down. But the Founding Fathers, alas, did not specify just how cold they wanted their tea or their laws to be.

The biggest number (15%) went to the Five-Star "movement" of a co­median, Beppe Grillo, whose web-fired campaign denounces all parties and promises not to ally with any of them. Mr Grillo is alarmingly thin on policies and wants a referendum on leaving the euro. Some call his movement the "anti-party"; others the "Fuck Off party". We all know what to do, we just don't know how to get re-elected after we have done it.

Democracy in America does not come cheap. The election cy­cle that has just limped to its exhausted conclusion cost around $6 billion — a new record, as in every new presidential cycle.

America's vice-presidency, one of its occupants once asserted in an oft- bowdlerised remark, is "not worth a bucket of warm piss".

"Latinos are Republicans," Ronald Reagan is supposed to have said. "They just don't know it yet."

Plato warned that democratic leaders would "rob the rich, keep as much of the proceeds as they can for themselves and distribute the rest to the people".

Officials would prefer you to be born, live, work, pay taxes, draw benefits and die in the same place, travel on one passport only, and bequeath only one nationality to your offspring.

Otto von Hasburg, 97, liberated from court etiquette, can call someone an "idiot" if he wants, instead of "your excellency". He was a technicolour politician in a monochrome landscape.

Public urinators rule the London streets.

CASA-CE, a new group headed by Abel Chivukuvuku, a former Unita man, is one of several being allowed to run for the first time, and may take votes from Unita.

Gerge McGovern promised swingeing cuts in the defence budget, an end to the war in Vietnam, an amnesty for draft-evaders, uni­versal health care, a guaranteed job for every American and an in­come above the poverty line for every American household. Bright- eyed young volunteers stuffed envelopes for him; Hollywood stars turned out for him; Simon and Garfunkel sang. To no avail. Richard

Nixon won 49 states; he won Massachusetts and the District of Co­lumbia. His name became a byword for Democratic disaster.

Air conditioning reshaped American politics, by enabling the migration of Republican pensioners to the Sun Belt. That helped break the long­standing Democratic lock on southern politics. America uses more elec­tricity for cooling than Africa uses for everything.

In 2008, we changed the guard. This year we must guard the change.

America comes to believe that it has wings. Then, Icarus-like, it soars too close to the sun and the wings melt.

The world is a competitive place. Britain is trying to run with its shoelaces tied together.

Houston was elected president of Texas five months later and in 1845 it be­came the 28th and largest of the United States of America. Alaska, the 49th state, is even larger. But, as some say in Texas, just wait 'til the ice melts.

If one compares Castro's lodgings with the White House, Buck­ingham Palace or the Elysee Palace, it would be fair to conclude that their residences are unpretentious.

Dr Gloor has found that, in Western countries at least, non-violent pro­test movements begin to burn out when the upbeat tweets turn nega­tive, with "not", "never", "lame", "I hate", "idiot" and so on becoming more frequent. Abundant complaints about idiots in the government or in an ideologically opposed group are a good signal of a movement's decline. Complaints about idiots in one's own movement or such infelicities as the theft of beer by a fellow demonstrator suggest the whole thing is almost over. Condor, then, is good at forecasting the course of existing protests. Even better, from the politicians' point of view, would be to pre­dict such protests before they occur.

The difference between Barack Obama, leader and Barack Oba- ma, campaigner is in the sleeves. When Mr Obama speaks as the president — sober, calm, head of a nation — he tends to encase them in a suit jacket. When he speaks as a candidate — fiery, en­thusiastic, figurehead of a party — he loses the jacket and rolls up his shirtsleeves.

In 1922 Archduke Otto von Habsburg, son of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor became the head of the House of Habsburg: "Your Majesty" to legitimists, and by the Grace of God "Emperor of Austria; King of Hun­gary and Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia and Lodomeria; King of Jerusalem, etc; Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow; Duke of Lorraine, Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and Bu- kowina; Grand Prince of Transylvania; Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Silesia, Modena, Parma, Piacenza, Guastalla, Auschwitz and Zator, Te- schen, Friaul, Dubrovnik and Zadar; Princely Count of Habsburg and Ty­rol, of Kyburg, Gorizia and Gradisca; Prince of Trento and Brixen; Mar­grave of Upper and Lower Lusatia". His other titles were more minor.

With the war over, Seward found the time to devote to expansion­ism. He not only arranged to buy Alaska for $7.2m in gold — one senator declared his support for the treaty on the condition "that the secretary of state be compelled to live there"— but he also be­gan planning for the acquisition of Hawaii and the construction of the Panama canal, both of which later came to pass. He also wanted to buy British Columbia, which would have connected the rest of America to Alaska, but "British honour" kicked in, among other factors, and he failed.

The great fear of every political leader is events, especially unexpected ones, and especially unexpected ones that are beyond the power of poli­ticians to control.

An iron law of politics holds that at times of political unravelling the fixer becomes the scapegoat and the planter of stories turns into the story itself.

Inside were the contents of President Lincoln's pockets on the night he was assassinated. Two pairs of spectacles; a lens polisher; a pocket knife; the fob of a watch; a leather wallet; a linen handkerchief; and nine news­paper clippings admiring of the president's policies.

Being a President is like riding a tiger — a man has to keep on rid­ing or being swallowed.

The after-life for a prime minister is a particularly empty one.

Ronald Reagan famously said, the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

While in opposition, Mr Cameron invited the Swede to his house for sup­per. I bicycle home, so may be late, he warned Mr Reinfeldt. Great, replied the Swedish prime minister, I'll grab a pint at a pub near your house.

Azhar Usman, a stand-up comic, says he is a "very patriotic" American Muslim. "I would die for this country," he declares. Af­ter a pause, he adds: "By blowing myself up." After another pause: "Inside of a Dunkin' Donuts."

Bush blamed the Iraqis for their inability to accept America's gift of freedom.

In Congo the government spent more than $500m on elections last year, making them the world's most costly after America's. High rates of illiteracy and a lack of capable institutions do not help. In Sierra Leone's border regions, officials judge who should get a voting card by listening to people's accents.

Tens of thousands of Puritans, who were religiously akin to the Pil­grims, reached America in the 1630s and 1640s, clustering in Massachu­setts Bay and Connecticut. The Indians were squeezed into ever smaller spaces as the English convinced them to sell their land. Dartmouth, Mr Philbrick reports, went for "30 yards of cloth, eight moose skins, 15 axes, 15 hoes, 15 pairs of shoes, one iron pot, and ten shillings' worth of as­sorted goods".

An Icarus-like government career: a shimmering rise and cut short by incaution.

Ben Bradlee was the 52nd male Bradlee to study at Harvard since 1795.

One of the best things about being a government is that nobody audits your accounts.

Toowoomba today — the rest of the world tomorrow?

"Give me a balcony and I will become president," said Jose Maria Velasco, Ecuador's most prominent populist, who was five times elected president and four times overthrown by the army.

Now that "nigger" (which he calls the N-word) has become taboo in polite society, what happens to Niggerhead Point? The author notes in passing that this cape on Lake Ontario was thus named because it was a point on the laudable underground railroad that helped thousands of escaped slaves to freedom in Canada. That interesting historical association sur­vives in the first name change, to Negrohead Point (which remains on federal maps). But to call it merely Graves Point (as New York state maps do) seems a pity. "Nigger" and "Jap" are now banned on American maps, though a Dago Gulch survives in western Montana. More puzzling to the non-American is the onslaught on the use of "Squaw", which accord­ing to some activists (though not philologists) is not an innocent word for a Native American woman, but a derogatory term for her vagina. So Squaw Peak is now set to be renamed after Lori Piestewa, the first Native American woman in the American army to be killed in combat.

In the year 15AD, during the short-lived Xin dynasty, a rumour spread that a yellow dragon, a symbol of the emperor, had in- auspiciously crashed into a temple in the mountains of central China and died. Ten thousand people rushed to the site. The em­peror Wang Mang, aggrieved by such seditious gossip, ordered arrests and interrogations to quash the rumour, but never found the source. He was dethroned and killed eight years later, and Han-dynasty rule was restored. You only need to move your lips to start a rumour, but you need to run until your legs are broken to refute one.

For the Democrats, this is a great opportunity. For years, they have en­joyed a consistent advantage over Republicans on "mommy" issues, such as education and health care. But Republicans have trounced them on "daddy" issues, such as killing terrorists and defending the homeland. The Democrats have lost a lot of elections because they are easy to cari­cature as the party that thinks "there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated."

Even an optimist would not describe Pakistan's glass as half full — keeping it unbroken may be the best one could hope for.

Cronyism is as American as apple pie. All countries have their cronies. That much-cited model of moral rectitude, Tony Blair, is so surrounded by them that they are called "Tony's cronies" (he made his old roommate, Charlie Falconer, Lord Chancellor). Edith Cresson, a European commis­sioner, appointed her dentist to an advisory position. But you expect that sort of thing in Brussels. America's problem is the contrast between high- minded idealism and low practice. America regards itself as the world's purest meritocracy — a country based on talent, not patronage and toady­ism. A quick glance at history shows this is rubbish. Most presidents surround themselves with a regional mafia: look at Carter's Georgians or Reagan's Californians or Clinton's Arkansans. These mafias produce some rum appointments: Jimmy Carter made his one-time campaign driv­er, Jody Powell, his press secretary; Bill Clinton made his chum from Miss Marie's kindergarten in Hope, Thomas McLarty, his chief of staff. Scandals are endemic. Harry Truman's Missouri cronies had a weakness for gifts of mink coats and freezers (an issue in the 1952 election). As for the antics of Mr. Clinton's Arkansas buddies, the less said the better.

Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the government and public opinion allow them to do.

In Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s, as in much of the South, the first four rows of seats were for whites only. No more than four rows were needed, since few whites, and those poor ones, took the bus anyway. But whether they were filled or not, no black could sit there. Blacks sat at the back, in "Coloured", where they belonged. Between the two worlds was a middle section. Blacks could sit there, but if a white needed their seat they were expected to vacate not one seat, but the whole row, in order to spare the white the embarrassment of sitting by a nigger.

93% of political spots on the Golf Channel are Republican, on Comedy Central, by contrast, the ads are 86% Democratic.

Rwanda's two main tribes, the Hutus and the Tutsis, have skirmished since pre-colonial times, but organised massacres are a modern evil. There used to be a lot of movement between the groups, but the Belgian colonists, who ruled from 1916 until 1962, judged that the tall, thin Tut- sis were superior to the shorter, flat-nosed Hutus, and decided to rule through them. They deposed Hutu chiefs in favour of Tutsis, favoured Tutsis in admissions to colonial schools, and created a legacy of eth­nic resentment. They also issued every Rwandan with an ethnic iden­tity card; these were to prove an invaluable tool for genocidaires who wanted to know whom to kill.

Neandertals were dim-witted brutes who lived a crude lifestyle.

Wasn't there at least a dog Hillary once omitted to kick or a child whose lollipop she didn't steal? They talked about linking American power with American ideals: but it turned out, at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, that power can corrupt those ideals.

To require senators to shuffle out of the door when they turn 75 rather than waiting to be carried out feet first.

To do the right deed for the wrong reason, T. S. Eliot wrote, is "the great­est treason" — a familiar one in the world of politics.

The people running Iran are not mystical, millenarian illuminati, but cold-blooded totalitarians.

The real problems start when politics comes into play.

Britishness (as opposed to the more tribal Englishness) has become an inclusive identity, based more on values than an­cestry.

Secret societies run through the tapestry of Italy's history like a half- hidden thread.

As an Arab sociologist puts it, in a tribal society you do not buy loyalty, you only rent it.

What does Islamist mean?

Some call them the "six-pack". Ever since Bosnia's election in Oc­tober 2010 the country has been waiting for the leaders of the six main parties — two Serbs, two Croats and two Bosniaks — to form a government.

Palestinian obligations were "musts" while Israeli ones "shoulds".

Ouagadougu, capital of Burkina Faso — "where people get honor and respect".

It was Barry Goldwater, a Republican politician, who pointed out that to serve in the armed forces, you don't have to be straight. You only have to shoot straight.

Parisians, the car dealers say, turn out to be the ones who are keenest to hide their origins — perhaps to protect their cars from casual vandalism when motoring on holiday, prompted by their reputation for haughty arrogance.

Adam Smith's first book, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments", "turned the tables" on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that society enslaved man to vanity and ambition. Smith argued, instead, that society taught man to be good. This tuition started from man's capacity for "sympathy": his ability to feel what another man feels. It continued with his capacity for sympathy squared: his ability to sense what other men feel about him, putting himself in the shoes of other men putting themselves in his shoes.

Perhaps people feel little need for corporate social responsibility when the government cares for them from cradle to grave.

Frankin D. Roosevelt did not have much time for Burma or the Burmese. The sympathy he felt for Indian demands for independence from Britain did not extend to that other piece of the British Raj now known as My- anmar. In 1942 he wrote to Winston Churchill: "I wish you could put the whole bunch of them into a frying pan with a wall around it and let them stew in their own juice."

The brass-hats should be answerable to the government.

One of America's most admirable characteristics is its belief that it has a duty of moral leadership.

The incumbent Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who is known for his chaotic charisma, has run the city competently enough.

One popular revival is the notion of tianxia, or "all under heaven". This dates back to the golden age of classical Chinese philosophy — of Con­fucius, Mencius, Laozi and the rest — in the "warring states" period be­fore China's unification in 221BC under the first Qin emperor. Tianxia is widely understood as a unified world dominated by one country (call it the "middle kingdom", perhaps), to which neighbours and those beyond look for guidance and pay tribute.

The representative for Long Island has approached this most sen­sitive of subjects with the delicacy of a steamroller.

The Lebanese would be rich indeed if they had a pound every time their country had been described as "on the brink" of violent collapse.

Osama bin Laden built the brand and turned it into a global fran­chise; his face advertised it, even as he disappeared.

Only after Mossadeq's ejection was the shah able to become a high- octane dictator.

Mr Bush's victory shows how much power a president has in wartime, even a deeply unpopular president fighting a deeply unpopular war.

Once installed in the presidential palace, he may find it much harder to continue to be all things to all men.

Demography is like a supertanker; it takes decades to turn around. It will pose some of China's biggest problems.

If people are bad at recalling their feelings, they are worse at predicting them.

The government owns 30% of Eni, and seems happy with its strat­egy. Of Eni's current board of nine, six are government appointees, described as independent; three of them are directors of compa­nies in the business empire of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's prime min­ister, and a fourth is a politician of the Northern League, a partner in Italy's governing coalition. Mr Scaroni, in turn, is a longstanding shareholder of Mr Berlusconi's AC Milan football club.

The Greek finance minister, George Papaconstantinou, must feel like a man who finds a one-euro coin on the pavement only to discover he had earlier dropped a five-euro note.

Merkel is a cautious consensus builder.

McCain has legendary volcanic temper who is a serial erupter.

North Korea is unique among communist countries in having what amounts to a royal family. The current dictator, Kim Jong Il, inherited power from his father, Kim Il Sung. The personality cult extends not only to them, but to Kim senior's mother, Kang Ban Suk ("mother of Korea"), to his first wife, Kim Chong Suk ("mother of revolution"), and to his brother, Kim Chol Ju ("the revolutionary fighter").

He also wants to cut the number of agencies run by the state from 1,000 to around 800 and to consolidate the New York state's astonishing 10,000 local governments.

Republicans are a party of white-trash pride.

It is one thing to be independent of politicians but quite another to have discussions with them in a crisis.

They have a policy of blaming the previous government. But they don't seem to realise that, after 11 years in power, they are the previous government.

Nowadays, a Republican candidate must believe not just some but all of the following things: that abortion should be illegal in all cases; that gay marriage must be banned even in states that want it; that the 12m illegal immigrants, even those who have lived in America for decades, must all be sent home; that the 46m people who lack health insurance have only themselves to blame; that global warming is a conspiracy; that any form of gun control is unconstitutional; that any form of tax increase must be vetoed, even if the increase is only the cancelling of an expensive and market-distorting perk; that Israel can do no wrong and the "so-called Palestinians", to use Mr Gingrich's term, can do no right; that the Envi­ronmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and others whose names you do not have to remember should be abolished Both parties must survive the cannibalistic ritual known as the primaries.

Media is awash with hysterical reports.

It turns out that the only thing that alarms Europeans more than a swag­gering American president is one who seems weak.

Asia accounted for more than half of world output for 18 of the last 20 centuries. Its growing clout in the world economy is, therefore, a "restoration" not a revolution.

How did as shrewd a politician as Mr Obama find himself stalemated? If not checkmated, so early in his presidency?

He is a democrat through and through.

His various appearances before congressional committees resembled nothing so much as the clubbing of a baby seal.

Even Major League Baseball is considering relocating its 2011 All-Star Game, the first ever slated to be played in the state. To Arizona's conservative machos, this one hurts — especially since it recalls the National Football League's decision in 1991 to move the 1993 Super Bowl to punish Arizona for not making the birth­day of Martin Luther King a holiday.

For the Democrats, this is a great opportunity. For years, they have en­joyed a consistent advantage over Republicans on "mommy" issues, such as education and health care. But Republicans have trounced them on "daddy" issues, such as killing terrorists and defending the homeland. The Democrats have lost a lot of elections because they are easy to cari­cature as the party that thinks "there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated".

Republicans and Democrats differ sharply as to which mighty in­stitutions pose the greatest threat to the little guy. Democrats, by and large, think big corporations are the problem. Republicans think big government is.

But the protection offered by a cradle-to-grave welfare system hides a dark underside.

British government has been running, using nursery rhymes: "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. There was none as extreme weather due to climate change had caused a drought."

But as Messrs Dornbusch and Edwards pointed out, "at the end of every populist experiment real wages are lower than they were at the begin­ning".

Behind a fig leaf of constructive engagement.

Mr Steinberg, a professor of modern European history at the University of Pennsylvania, is fascinated by Bismarck's complex personality. He started writing about him because he wanted to understand how his hero led three wars and unified Germany without commanding a single soldier, without a big political par­ty backing him, without any experience in government before his nomination as minister-president of Prussia in 1862 and without great oratorical skills. Bismarck had near-hypnotic powers over William. He manipulated him with temper tantrums, tears, hys­terical outbursts and frequent threats of resignation. "It is hard to be king under Bismarck," sighed the sovereign.

What should really worry policymakers is the unknown unknowns.

£ £ Law, justice, rules

I would rather be judged by 12 than carried by six.

Last year America shut down a fake embassy in South Africa, complete with the Stars and Stripes and a photo of President Barack Obama, that had been operating in Ghana for a decade. It had been selling fake visas to America for $6,000 each.

The less people know about how laws and sausages are made, the better they sleep at night (Bismarck).

Arkansas has an unhappy history of multiple executions: in 1923 a man was taken from his coffin and put back in the electric chair after he was found still to be breathing.

Imagine a traffic-light regulation that says: "On green the driver may cross the road, unless, under the given circumstances, a reasonable per­son would consider this to be risky, inadequate or reckless. We now need a lawyer as a co-driver."

Does a bill that does nothing actually do something?

Perhaps half of America's private-sector employers ask job ap­plicants to declare their criminal records, and two-thirds rou­tinely run checks before taking people on. They see it as neces­sary due diligence. Unfortunately, checks that individual firms believe to be prudent are collectively bad for the 7m Americans who have spent time in prison and the 70m with a criminal record.

Fish are slippery characters, with little regard for international agree­ments or borders. The speediest, such as crescent-tailed bluefin tuna, can slice through the ocean at 70 kilometres per hour. Their routes take them beyond areas that come under the jurisdiction of individual coastal states, and into the high seas.

Oilmen groom the politicians; politicians do their best for the oil­men. Corporations grease the legislators, legislators return the favors.

"The moon was in its seventh house and Jupiter lined up with Mars," said Mr Chambers after senators overwhelmingly voted for the ban.

The thicker the rule book, the bigger the headache when it drops on you.

Many talk of being sovereign as if it were like being pregnant: one either is or is not.

Prison is an expensive way to make bad people worse.

Mathew, an Irish judge at the turn of the 20th century, is said to have quipped that justice in England is open to all, "like the Ritz Hotel".

Sophisticated legal services are somewhat like luxury cars and handbags, in that a high asking-price is taken as a sign of quality. No one wants to have hired the cheaper firm in a high-stakes lawsuit.

Parliament was so quiet you may hear a bill drop.

A generation ago Saadallah Wannous, a Syrian playwright, fa­mously lamented that his people were "sentenced to hope".

Asking the justice system to reform itself was like tying up a dog with a string of sausages — the legislative sausage machine.

What happens to our digital property after we die?

Every oil spill has a silver lining — if you are a lawyer, that is.

Winston Churchill thought Parliament should meet for no more than five months a year.

A former kangaroo skinner faced a kangaroo court.

The hangmen job advertisement, published only in the state- owned Sinhala-language newspaper, drew 178 responses. Appli­cants included a man with one eye, autorickshaw drivers, retired military men, labourers and a university student whose many attempts at securing other employment had failed. Ten aspirants were rejected, mostly because they were too old or too young. One woman was turned down on the ground that her gender would make her too emotional. No other qualifications were re­quired, beyond a basic school education. Officials worried that a more erudite class of executioner might be tempted to chuck in this job for another. Two (anonymous) candidates have been chosen to fill the vacancies. But since neither of the two previous executioners hanged anybody during their tenure, and one has since died, training the new recruits poses a challenge.

Suppose you want to buy a table. But you care about orang-utans, in­digenous peoples and carbon emissions, so you don't want it made with illegally harvested logs. Or suppose you run a chain of furniture shops, and you don't want to go to jail for buying illegal timber. Either way, you face a snag: how to tell if a log is legal?

Rape laws also determine whether consensual sexual activity in­volving young people is legal. The first recorded law on this was in England in 1275, which made it an offence to have sex (with or without her consent) with a "maiden within age". This was in­terpreted as meaning below the age of marriage, at that time 12 (Shakespeare's Juliet was 13 at the time of her romance with Ro­meo). A 17-year-old and a 15-year-old can have legal sex in one European Union country (Denmark) but commit a crime if they canoodle in Britain (though in practice the risk of prosecution would be minimal).

Some prisons in Brazil are so chaotic that inmates are not released once their sentences are over. Other prisoners, such as Marcos Mariano da Sil- va, a mechanic arrested for murder in 1976, are victims of mistaken iden­tity. He spent six years in jail in Pernambuco before the real culprit was arrested and he was released. Three years later he was stopped by traffic police who rearrested him as a fugitive. He spent 13 more years in jail, contracting tuberculosis. He died last year, hours after hearing that the state government had lost its appeal against paying him compensation.

Mr Zuma himself once faced corruption charges, escaping trial by the skin of his teeth on a legal technicality.

Was the ball over the goal-line? (Note to German readers: maybe not at Wembley in 1966, yes in Bloemfontein in 2010.) Was that sending-off de­served, or a gross miscarriage of justice? Was the referee brilliant, blind or bribed?

International Criminal Court has no gumshoes or handcuffs of its own — members must help to bring in the accused.

The lord's right to make the peasants, after working all day, sit up and whip the ponds all night with boughs, to prevent the frogs'music from disturbing my lord's slumbers.

Instead of finding a needle in the haystack, they are making more.

If not the land of the free, America is certainly the land of the ingenious lawyer.

£ £ Love, marriage, family, sex, friendship, children

According to myth, Eros carried arrows tipped either in gold or in lead: the gold ones incited extreme desire; the lead ones killed it.

Why are adult men in India so eager to have their wives breast­feed them?

Male prisoners look for bits of wire to make weapons and stab each other, she says. "Women look for wire to curl their eyelashes."

When Mr Trump divorced the first of his three wives, Ivana, he let the New York tabloids know that one reason for the separation was that her breast implants felt all wrong.

Egypt was once at the forefront of contraception. In ancient times wo­men inserted a paste made with crocodile dung into their vaginas to pre­vent pregnancy.

Never give money to an online paramour, however charming.

Be nice to your kids — they choose your nursing home.

Some results are both disturbing and perplexing, such as the pre­valence of searches on pornographic sites for videos depicting sexual violence against women, and the fact that women them­selves seek out these scenes at least twice as often as men do.

A common myth in Sudan is that an uncut clitoris will grow into a third leg.

If diamonds were to cease being a way to signal a man's mar­riageability, what might take their place?

In Egypt and Palestine, over half of men and women say that if a woman is raped, she should marry her rapist. In at least three of the countries, more women than men say that women who dress provocatively de­serve to be harassed.

In the 1920s even respectable ladies began painting their faces, and the cosmetics industry exploded.

Children are said to have "six pockets": two from their parents, and four from their grandparents.

A lioness may mate up to 100 times a day with different lions dur­ing oestrus.

Dating is a treacherous business. There may be plenty of fish in the sea, yet many are unhygienic, self-absorbed, disconcertingly attached to ex- fish, or fans of Donald Trump. In a sense, searching for a mate is not so different from hunting for a job.

Family feuds are discouraged when no relative can dream of run­ning off to Bahamas with all the loot. "There are no family fights," says one Wallenberg. "No one understands how it works, but it works well".

If you can't find love change your appearance.

Peacocks strut; bowerbirds build lovenests; spiders gift-wrap flies in silk. Such courtship rituals play an important role in what Charles Darwin called sexual selection: when the female of a species bears most of the costs of reproduction, males use extravagant displays and gifts to demonstrate their "reproduc­tive fitness" and females choose between them. For human males, shards of a crystalline form of carbon often feature. A diamond engagement ring signals a man's taste, wealth and commitment, all to persuade a woman that he is a good bet.

De Beers can no longer control the market. Though it is the biggest producer by value, it accounts for only a third of global sales, down from 45% in 2007. Meanwhile the source of the demand that drives sales — the link between diamonds and love — looks weaker than it used to. The ancient Greeks regarded diamonds as the tears of the gods.

Saudi Arabia lavishes cash on suspected terrorists who co­operate with its deradicalisation programme, setting them up with jobs, cars and even wives.

It is a status symbol, demonstrating that even as a man approaches the expenses of married life, he can still splash out on a bauble.

Procter & Gamble roared into the disposable-nappy business with Pampers in 1961.

The progenitor ofJapan's imperial line, supposedly 2,600 years ago, was female: Amaterasu, goddess of the sun. But for most of the time since, all emperors have been male.

Chopsticks come in pairs.

Divorce is still common — more than 800,000 marriages were annulled in 2014 — and it is often costly and protracted. A survey by Nolo, a le­gal publisher, suggests the average American couple spends $15,000 and 10.7 months untying the knot.

A procedure called mitochondrial donation, which would result in a child with DNA from three people: its mother, its father and a female donor sometimes dubbed a mitomum.

How a woman can love a daughter born of rape?

More than 10m Americans are estimated to date digitally, and as an industry in 2013 it reached $2 billion in revenue with over 2,500 dating sites in the United States.

"The best countries", Fourie wrote, "have always been those which allowed women the most freedom."

Love, it turns out, is not innocent hanky-panky, but something

noxious, corrosive — even deadly.

The menopause is a puzzle.

A country's GDP falls when a man marries his maid.

The most important career choice a woman makes is whom she marries. A supportive spouse can help you excel; a jealous or lazy one may hold you back.

In the mid-1800s, before the advent of negatives and half-tone printing, a photo of a naked prostitute cost more than engaging her for sex. Not until 1953, when Hugh Hefner launched Playboy with a nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe, did porn go mass-market.

When men announce they are about to have a child, they are simply congratulated; when women do, they are congratulated and then asked what they plan to do about work.

50% of marriages end in divorce, the other 50% end in death. So take your pick.

How do robots have sex? By swapping software "genotypes" via infrared communications, ideally when facing each other 30cm apart. Not exact­ly a salty punchline.

Cuttlefish are cross-dressers, the male argonaut (a pelagic octo­pus) has a detachable, projectile penis, dolphins are in flagrante acrobats, and group sex erupts (where else?) on the California coast twice a year when tens of thousands of grunions disport themselves on the beach. Led by the moon and tides, the small fish fling themselves ashore. The female digs a hole in the sand with her tail, backs in, lays eggs, and waits while up to eight males snuggle up and release their sperm.

Loneliness, conversely, can be deadly: one study found it did more dam­age to health than smoking.

Dogs, unlike people, are capable of pure love — at least according to Freud.

Britain leads the rich world in indicators associated with solitary life­styles: gym-going (as opposed to team sports), divorce, smartphone and tablet adoption (replacing the family television set), self-employment, online shopping, eating alone, meal-skipping and the declines of both the pub and the nuclear family. Clubs of all sorts, from churches and political parties to golf clubs and trade unions, are shrinking.

If backward time travel were possible, some fool would no doubt try testing the grandfather paradox, another invention of time- travelling fiction writers. In this, a visitor to the past kills his or her grand-father before the conception of the protagonist's own parent, meaning the protagonist could never have been born, and the murder could not have taken place.

In the old days if you wanted a promotion you wore a short skirt, now it's the other way round.

More than 90% of presidents and prime ministers are male, as are nearly all big corporate bosses. Men dominate finance, technol­ogy, films, sports, music and even stand-up comedy. In much of the world they still enjoy social and legal privileges simply be­cause they have a Y chromosome.

What is a "rampant homosexual"? What makes him rampant, and do rampant heterosexuals exist as well?

Well-to-do parents fear two things: that their children will die in a freak accident, and that they will not get into Harvard. The first fear is wildly exaggerated. The second is not, but staying awake all night worrying about it will not help — and it will make you miserable.

Michael Burgess, suggested that fetuses are already masturbating by 20 weeks — although only male ones.

Some transgender people do not go to the loo all day because they have been harassed, assaulted or kicked out of one. This can result in dehydration, urinary-tract infections and kidney problems.

Women are just men with less money.

In 1939, 10% of American brides received a diamond engagement ring. By the end of the century 80% did. 26% of young American brides say they dreamed about their future engagement rings years before beginning a relationship.

A pun, like porn, is defined less by intention than by reception.

Tax reform is always the bridesmaid and never the bridem.

The hijab helps women be treated for their minds, not their looks.

Over Sabbath meals, Israelis who are worried about growing intol­erance discuss whether to put their children or their country first.

It's like a big house with only one bathroom, and daddy's been in there too long.

Each suburban housewife, wrote Betty Friedan in 1963, struggles with a single question as she makes the beds, shops for groceries, chauffeurs children about and lies beside her husband at night: "Is this all?"

Confucious said that while a man's parents were alive, he should not travel far afield.

Will fatherhood make me happy?

A husband follows his wife and another man to a hotel room. Through the keyhole he sees the pair embrace. As they fling off their clothes his wife's underwear catches on the doorknob, blocking his view of what happens next — and leaving his faith in her fidelity intact.

Even in Mecca and Medina people have intercourse.

Armpits4August, a campaign, encourages women to grow underarm hair for a month to challenge norms of beauty. Members of La Barbe, a shock troop of French feminists set up in 2008, infiltrate male-dominated meetings wearing beards and derisively congratulate the men on their supremacy.

Immanuel Kant has the best insights into the gay-marriage de­bate — he argues that, once you have stripped away the nonsense, marriage is nothing more than a contract for the mutual use of

the sex organs.

For those not naturally well endowed, breast implants may make eco­nomic sense: going from flat-chested to a D-cup increases hourly rates by approximately $40, meaning that at a typical price of $3,700, surgery could pay for itself after around 90 hours.

It does seem that the little darlings really are good for your health — something to remember next time your children's be­havior makes you want to scream.

Plato described love as a serious mental disease. Aristotle saw it as a single soul inhabiting two bodies. Tina Turner dismissed the feeling as a second-hand emotion. The nature of love — how and when and why and with whom humans fall for each other — has preoccupied thinkers through the ages.

Shakespeare mused that "it is beyond the power of man to bring love and wisdom to an union."

A newly-discovered scrap of one of holy texts which seems to quote Je­sus speaking of "my wife." Karen King of Harvard University presented a translation at a conference in Rome on September 18th. Churches that believe their priests must be celibate in order to be like Jesus are not about to change their rules, though. Assuming the fragment is genuine, it shows only that others talked about Jesus using that word. The definition of "wife" is open to question too: Gnostic writing also features terms such as "bridal chamber", used without any connotation of sexual intimacy.

The vagina is not nearly as free today in the West as we are led to believe.

The problem with penises, as Richard Rudgley, a British anthropologist, admitted on a television programme some years ago, is that once you start noticing them, you "tend to see willies pretty much everywhere".

The euro was supposed to be the manifestation of a grand politi­cal project. It feels more like a loveless marriag e, in which the cost of breaking up is the only thing keeping the partners together.

When he reads obituaries he looks not for the age of the deceased but the length of their marriages, and envies those who had more time than he did.

After all, whose spam filter does not groan with ads for suspi­ciously cheap "Viagra"?

One Chinese billionaire has particular requirements for a matchmaking agency: suitable candidates should be aged 20-26, weigh less than 50kg (110lb) and have no sexual experience. So far more than 5,000 young women have applied.

"Customer 360" is due to be tested in the new London store next spring. It will mean that Burberry keeps a detailed database on each customer's spending habits. That could cause embarrass­ment, for example if a customer who has bought racy gifts for his mistress enters a Burberry store with his wife and is enthusiasti­cally ushered to the skimpy bikinis.

Are there no American children who have broken a leg at camp, suffered psychological trauma by coming last in a race, or been discriminated against by competing against stronger boys?

Finding a nice Jewish girl in Mississippi isn't easy.

Beautiful flowers — like beautiful women — can separate the most sen­sible men from their money. In the 17th century Holland, tulips grew so expensive that people exchanged them for houses.

In early imperial Rome, when the emperor Augustus put a tax on celibacy in response to anaemic marriage rates, he faced a spate of betrothals to underage women, an open revolt from his sena­tors — and a decline in his citizens' conjugal appetites.

Are you cheating on your spouse? If so, please stand up and declare it. Total silence? What virtuous readers The Economist has.

The latest survey of time use in America suggests women still shoulder most of the housework, spending on average an hour a day scrubbing, hoovering and shopping, compared with barely 20 minutes for the unfairer sex.

Performing a Mozart quartet takes just as long in 2012 as it did in the late 18 th century.

Defining rape, or trying to, is a sure-fire way to start a row. Does age matter? (In some countries, sex with minors is automatically rape; in others, it is not.) Must it involve violence? What kind of sex is involved? Is the victim by definition a woman and the perpetra­tor a man? Do time, location or the parties' sexual histories play any role?

I don't know any successful women who haven't had a powerful sponsor in their organisation to give them their first big break.

Marriage is a surprisingly good predictor of management style, reckon Nikolai Roussanov and Pavel Savor of Wharton Business

School. The average unmarried boss invests 69% more than his married counterpart, they find.

Lillian Hellman was a hypocritical "bitch with balls", in the words of Elia Kazan.

When Theits, Achilles's mother, dipped her baby in the river Styx to give him her gift of invulnerability, she had to hold him some­where.

The upper-middle-class members of the Beggar's Benison club in Scot­land, founded in 1732, apparently thought nothing of arranging meetings where they could drink, sing and fondle naked women. Such evenings were brought to a fitting climax, as it were, when they would commu­nally ejaculate into a ceremonial pewter platter.

Americans need to vote to kick the state out of the bedroom, or the boardroom, but not both.

Medically, it was possible to make a woman speak, but there was no medical way of making one silent.

As someone who has studied Mandarin for years, I can tell you that the most difficult aspect of any language to master is neither tone, grammar, nor spelling, but rather how to use it to commu­nicate with a woman.

A golden wedding is a terrible time for a marital crisis.

The happy life seems to be lived in accordance with goodness, and such a life implies seriousness and doesn't consist in amus­ing oneself.

The judges decided that a child who has been brutalised becomes freer to make sexual choices. So a child prostitute is somehow no longer a child.

People inherit mitochondria only from their mothers, which is why only the female line of descent can be tracked using them.

Being liked is not the same as doing shit.

Being gay-friendly can attract gay customers, too. Witeck-Combs Communications, a consultancy, estimates that gay Americans spend $835 billion a year. But But homosexuality is still illegal in 76 countries — including such vibrant business hubs as Dubai and Singapore — and is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, Iran and parts of Nigeria. 29 US states still allow discrimination on the basis of sexual preference.

"As part of their daily lives, children across Europe and the world con­tinue to be spanked, slapped, hit, smacked, shaken, kicked, pinched, punched, caned, flogged, belted, beaten and battered in the name of dis­cipline, mainly by adults whom they depend on."

Ali Hili, head of a group called Iraqi LGBT, (Lesbian, Gay, Bi­sexual and Transgender) says that since the 2003 invasion more than 700 people have been killed because of their sex­uality. Lesbians in Muslim countries tend to have an easier time: in Iran they are sentenced to death only on the fourth conviction.

Why, though, allow yourself to be ambushed if you are a female? Why mate with a second-class beau who cannot be bothered to bring you the fishy equivalent of roses and diamonds? No matter how hard males compete, they will always be outwitted by the wiliest, most subversive competitors of all: females.

With their talk of placing stability and growth above individual rights, Communist officials sometimes make human rights sound like air conditioning, or colour television: a luxury you can afford once you acquire a certain level of wealth.

Women can be required to lift their veils "if necessary" — would that be before or after a veiled suicide-bomber detonates her (or his) device?

It is particularly striking in a Stockholm playground filled with Somali toddlers, squeaking as they queue for sledge-rides.

When most people talk about "broken Britain" they mean whether some­one stands for a pregnant woman on a train or fears being stabbed for asking kids to throw their litter in a bin.

In 1849 George Bancroft, an American historian and diplomat, said that for a man to have two countries was as intolerable as for him to have two wives.

It is thought that about 10m Asian women sell sex to 75m men, who in turn have a further 50m regular partners.

Sharing a womb is not an ideal start to life.

To Mr Santorum the Supreme Court's ruling in 2003 that anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional was a bad mistake: this was a slippery slope that would establish a right to bigamy, polygamy, incest, adultery — "an­ything".

When Iranians say "Death to America" they sometimes mean

"Please America, show me more love".

"Pre-salt oil is like a pretty woman on a dance floor full of men," Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil's president, put it bluntly. "Everybody wants a go."

Relatives, friends, children and dogs are du, everyone else is Sie.

"Bin Laden", he said, "is the illegitimate child of Ronald Reagan and Mar­garet Thatcher".

To Edward Weston Charis Wilson was a landscape — in the re­peated curve of her thigh and calf he saw shapes like sea shells, with the luminescence and faint muscular rays of the great chambered nautilus. Her torso, outlined in light, was like the trunk of a cypress tree just entering the soil. Her skin, every fol­licle and flaw in focus in the ground glass of his lens, had the same sun- and sea-wind weathering, but fainter, of the stones of the Californian desert, and her hips had the convolutions of the naked mountains.

Any Mohawk who marries a non-native must leave. "Everyone knows the law: if you marry out, you stay out".

Mr Ahmadinejad compared Hillary Clinton, the American secre­tary of state, who has asked Syria to distance itself from Iran, to "the daughter-in-law's mother", in the Iranian family a symbol of easily ignored powerlessness.

Greater promiscuity in females does, indeed, lead to bigger testes, pre­sumably because a male needs to make more sperm to have a fight­ing chance of fathering offspring, if those sperm are competing with sperm from a lot of other males. Gorillas, which discourage dalliances between other males and the females of their harem, have small testes. Chimpanzees, among whom females mate widely, have large ones. Hu­man testes lie between these two extremes.

If America stood for anything, it was to kick Communist butts.

Her passage through the family was like the river Rhone flowing through the lake of Geneva "without mingling any part of its streams with that lake".

In 2000 the census takers in China reported an undercount of 1.81%. Officials deemed this to be within acceptable limits. To compensate, they added more than 22m notional people to the to­tal, to produce a population of 1.27 billion. Many of the uncounted were so-called "black children", ie, those born in breach of regu­lations that limit urban couples to a single child. From sample surveys, officials estimate the population at the end of 2009 to have been 1.33 billion.

She accidentally poisoned him with a potion she thought would render him eternally faithful.

By riding on the coat-tails of his wife's brother-in-law, Nathan Rothschild.

Durex, Trojan and Australia's Ansell offer chiefly condom brands that appeal to men, with names such as "Performa", "Magnum", and "Jissbon", whose name in Chinese means "James Bond". Safedom, by contrast, sells "Elegant Winter" condoms under brands such as "Beautiful Girl" and "Green Lemon" in oval-shaped, paisley-patterned tins. Its marketing emphasises female health benefits. Whether or not Safedom goes all the way in Europe and other markets will, as usual, depend on the womenA short man, and a serial fornicator, Koestler, it seems, used his conquests as a kind of self-validation.

A trait is sexually selected if it evolved specifically to enhance mating success. They come in two main forms: weapons, such as an elk's horns are used to fight off competitors; and ornaments, like a peacock's tail, which are used to advertise genetic fitness to attract the opposite sex.

££ Nature

Why not name storms after senators instead?

On current trends, the Arctic ocean will be largely ice-free in summer by 2040.

Sharks kill jast 10-20 people worldwide each year while humans kill around 73m sharks.

How did the world get from bacteria to Bach, from fungus to fugues?

In August 2016 the result of the Great Elephant Census, the most exten­sive count of a wild species ever attempted, suggested that about 350,000 African savannah elephants remain alive. This is down by 140,000 since 2007.