The difficulty with the achievements of the empire is that they are much more likely to be taken for granted than the sins of the empire. - Niall Ferguson

The struggle for world mastery between Britain and France would rage on with only brief respite until 1815. But the Seven Years War decided one thing irrevocably. India would be British, not French. And that gave Britain what for nearly two hundred years would be both a huge market for British trade and an inexhaustible reservoir of military manpower. India was much more than the ‘jewel in the crown’. Literally and metaphorically, it was a whole diamond mine.

There were Chernobyl-like features of the way that the United States handled the [Covid] pandemic, in particular the reluctance of the responsible officials ever to admit any responsibility for any of the things that went wrong.

The rise of China is the great economic and political fact of our lifetime — a rude awakening for those of us who thought it was the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1951, China was an impoverished backwater with a revolutionary government that Joseph Stalin easily duped into fighting on his behalf in Korea. Today, thanks to the biggest and fastest industrial revolution in history, China is the superpower, Russia its junior partner.