Montagues and Capulets, French and English, Whig and Tory, Airbus and Boeing, Pepsi and Coke, Serb and Muslim, Christian and Saracen – we are irredee… - Matt Ridley

Friedrich Hayek advanced the view that the common law contributed to greater economic welfare because it was less interventionist, less under the tutelage of the state, and was better able to respond to change than civil legal systems; indeed, it was for him a legal system that led, like the market, to a spontaneous order.

The most important fact about extreme weather is that the number of deaths caused by floods, droughts and storms has dropped by 93 per cent since the 1920s, despite a trebling of the world population: not because the weather has grown less wild, but because the world has grown rich enough to enable us to protect ourselves better.

Just as human nature is the same everywhere, so it is recognizably the same as it was in the past.