Thinking Out Aloud

Came across the following statistic: in the First World War, 5% of deaths were civilians. In the Second World War, 65% of deaths were civil...

The Making of the Middle Ages by R.W. Southern is classic "wide scope" history. In the mid-C9th, Ibn Khurradadhbeh described We...

An African infrastructure minister visits an Asian colleague. The Asian colleague lives in a magnificent mansion. "How can you afford...

Stephanie Cootz’s Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage is a clear, well-written, well-researched and extremely enlightening his...

It is a characteristic of modern democratic states that they are over-supplied with law and under-supplied with courts. Medieval England wo...

The Mystery of Economic Growth by Elhanan Helpman, a commentary on recent economic growth scholarship, is a moderately useful short book. ...

Peter Attiwill on The Case For Fuel Reduction Burning in Australia’s Forests The Adam Smith Club will host a dinner meeting (pdf) on Tuesd...

Forensic psychologist Nigel Latta’s book Into the Darklands and Beyond: Unveiling the Predators Amongst Us is about working with sexual pre...

It is an established fact of economic life that wages are “sticky” downwards. That is, that sacking people is typically resorted to more th...

Islam and democracy are incompatible because democracy makes the people sovereign, an offence against the sovereignty of Allah; because demo...

Mass prosperity was developed first by in North-Western Europe and its offshoot societies in North America and the Antipodes. The first non...

If you block the responsiveness of a system to change so it becomes increasingly dysfunctional, you can point to that dysfunction as evidenc...

Edwin S. Hunt and James M. Murray’s A History of Business in Medieval Europe 1200-1550 is an excellent history of medieval business. The b...

Recently attended a dinner meeting where a former senior economic policy person gave a talk on the global financial crisis (GFC) and its mor...

Corey Taylor’s Naked: The Life and Pornography of Michael Lucas is about a gay Russian Jew porn actor and director who has turned himself i...

Thomas Bartlett’s excellent The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350 is a fine history of the development ...

Reading R. I. Moore’s very informative description of how medieval clerks operated as they rose in social importance, it all sounded hugel...

T he First European Revolution by R. I. Moore is the book synthesising post- Reynolds contemporary medieval scholarship on the transition ...