Any book on empire will omit, by necessity, vast tracts of the imperial experience, and so critics can easily find facts and details to contradict an author's bold generalisations.
If you are a borrower, the more you borrow, the more it costs.
I don't see how a lowering of VAT helps much, in terms of stimulus. VAT is a form of sales tax. It gets paid when you spend. A stimulus should put money in your pocket before you have actually spent the money.
We are often told that capitalism is in crisis, but look around the world and you'll see that it has never been so buoyant.
The idea that, in the age of Google, Facebook and the internet, government can control the 'commanding heights' of the economy is one of the great delusions of our age. Modern techonology, social media, the explosion of online retail, among many other things, have meant that governments have less and less control.
Clearly, for capitalism to work properly we must expect some upward normalisation of interest rates at some future point, to provide greater incentive for savers to save and investors to invest.
Conservatives should never be shy in promoting a strong case for individual enterprise. We should acknowledge where the system doesn't work, and seek to amend it.
I remember being told after the 1992 general election that Labour could never win a majority in Britain ever again.
It's the easiest thing in the world to assume that what seems so obvious at one moment in time is a hard, perpetual fact of life.
The bull market, rising prices, earning lots of money, make it seem as if the good days will never end. When prices are falling and there is a recession, that also feels as though it will last for ever. Politics is the same. People simply can't imagine changing circumstances.
Frontrunners always attract envy, and a desperate campaign to stop them in their tracks.
In our media-driven age, the mere fact of having name recognition is a big advantage. When the leadership election was confined only to Conservative MPs, relatively obscure figures could emerge quickly.
I think interventions tend to be wrong. That doesn't mean to say that every intervention has been a disaster, but it does mean that generally they tend to screw up.
History is of all subjects the one which is most engaged with people's perceptions of themselves, identity, politics, all those things which shape the modern world.
The idea that historians aren't affected by what goes on around them I think is slightly fanciful.
I think that running empires as a way of ordering the world is a flawed model.
