Soaring Prices For Crude Oil, Falling Production

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.

At The Heart Of Banking Is A Suicidal Strategy. Banks Take Money From The Public Or Each Other On Call, Skim It For Their Own Reward And Then Lock The Rest Up In Volatile, Insecure And Illiquid Loans That At Times They Cannot Redeem Without Public Aid.

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.

For 50 Years, Nuclear Power Stations Have Produced Three Products Which Only A Lunatic Could Want: Bomb-explosive Plutonium, Lethal Radioactive Waste And Electricity So Dear It Has To Be Heavily Subsidised. They Leave To Future Generations The Task, And Most Of The Cost, Of Making Safe Sites That Have Been Polluted Half-way To Eternity.

Europe And North America, We Are Told, Are Less Dependent On Energy-intensive Heavy Industry Than In The 1960s And 1970s. It Seems We Squeeze More Gdp Out Of A Barrel Of Oil Than In Those Benighted Days.