When Aristotle repeated the wisdom of the Delphic Oracle of ‘Know Thyself’ he was preceded and followed by a long line of poets, philosophers and other idlers. The phrase spans all languages, all religions. It is one of those quick and helpful philosophical gems which, like the ‘Cogitans’ of Descartes – …

There was a time when the HG Wells story ‘War of the Worlds’, made into a horrific musical score by Jeff Wayne, was pure fantasy. A time when ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ was an album by Pink Floyd and stand-up comedians, like Norm McDonald, could make jokes about …

A change of seasons brings a change of perspective. With St Martin appearing on a white horse to signal the first snows in central and eastern Europe, with the mid- terms behind us and the cost to the west growing like a US budget deficit, the talk has turned to …

When the French Revolution abolished the ‘Estates General’, and appeared to usher in the Enlightenment virtues of egalitarianism, the accepted liberal historical view was that the age of absolutist and clerical elites had been confined to the dustbin of history. Whilst the absolutism of the past was replaced by varieties …

The consensus amongst liberals in the 1990s and, arguably, since Adam Smith, was a belief in the ‘de-territorialisation’ of the world. This was the belief that globalisation was a force for good, an economic version of Christendom, that the invisible hand of the market would produce benefits on a global …

One of my favourite essays is Vaclav Havel’s ‘Power of The Powerless’ in which he gives the example of the Czech grocer obliged to place a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite’ Havel asks if this sign shows the grocer’s enthusiasm for socialist principles or even his …