Soaring Prices For Crude Oil, Falling Production

Whatever Else It Was, Adolf Hitler's Short-lived Regime Was Also A Colossal Industrial Process By Which The Wealth And Productive Power Of Much Of Europe Was Wrenched From Its Normal Purposes And Converted Into A Machine For Killing.

The Rise To Prominence Of The Saudi Novel In Arabic Is The Great Man-bites-dog Of Recent World Literature. Saudi Arabia Is A Country Without A Free Press, Where European Styles And Forms Are Distrusted And Where The Female Half Of The Population Became Literate Only In This Generation.

The Year 2008 Was A Reminder To Those Who Had Forgotten That There Is Such A Thing As History And That The Cycle Of Famine And Feast In Commerce, First Identified In Antiquity And Well Understood In The Middle Ages, Was Not Suddenly Abolished In Modern Times.

One Of The Admirable Features Of British Novelists Is That They Have No Scruple About Setting Their Stories In Foreign Settings With Wholly Foreign Personnel.

Governments Of Rich Countries Spend Some $6bn Of Tax Money A Year On Disaster Relief And Development Aid Overseas, While Each New Earthquake, Famine Or Tidal Wave Can Attract 1,000 Aid Organisations, From The United Nations Children's Fund And Oxfam To The 'jesus Brigades' Of The American South And Other Charitable Adventurers.