Book Reviews

As every schoolboy knows, ‘the empire on which the sun never set’ was British, and ‘blue-blooded’ was a phrase applied to the nobility who ruled it for most of its history. And every schoolboy is wrong. The phrase was coined to describe the dominions of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (or Charles I of Spain), which were the first to span the requisite number of time zones; and ‘blue blood’ — sangre azul — referred to his Visigothic ancestors who reconquered Spain from the Moors, who had held it since 711 AD. These northern warlords would apparently show the purity of their ancestry by revealing the visible veins in

This is an interesting document, and a pretty bad novel. I don’t know why anyone thought it would be otherwise. In 1960, Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird. It was an important statement, as well as a very good novel. Just as it took the southerner Lyndon B. Johnson to make the most significant civil rights concessions, so literary culture needed a novel written by a woman from the south saying all the right things about race in the firmest way possible. The book was compelling, and immediately made its way into classrooms worldwide, where it has stayed. Subsequently, Harper Lee made it very clear that she would not

Financial crises are nothing new in Greece. Back in 354 BC, at a time when Frankfurt was still a swamp, the Athenian general Xenophon wrote a briefing paper designed to help his city negotiate the aftermath of a disastrous war. His proposals mixed supply-side reform with Keynesian stimulus. The regulatory powers of Athenian officials, so Xenophon suggested, should be streamlined and enhanced; simultaneously, the city should invest in increasing its commercial and housing stock. The economy, boosted by these measures, would also benefit from encouraging foreign investment. ‘Imports and exports, sales, rents and customs’: all would then surely flourish. Traditionally, the reputation of classical Greece among economists has tended to

As I got into a Brighton taxi this morning, my driver’s first words were ‘apparently it’ll clear in a couple of hours’. I gathered — of course — that he was talking about the morning mist. ‘It’s almost gone already up in town.’ A conversation about weather prospects is hardly uncommon in British taxis, and we launched into this one with no preamble at all (he hadn’t said hello), as though invisibly picking up the thread of a conversation already in progress, a perpetual, life-long discussion about whether it’ll rain tomorrow filling in as the default whenever nothing else is being said. It’s odd. And in The Weather Experiment, Peter