Michael Wood on Prometheus

The moral of Prometheus is that the quest for knowledge beyond reasonable, practical limits is like a form of sexual recklessness. You won't get a disease but you will, man or woman, become pregnant with your own destruction.

The Marquise de Sevigne

"There are three important things in life. The first is to eat well, and - I have forgotten the others."

Ferdinand Mount asks if Britain is turning into an oligarchy. David Runciman replies.

A better guide to the current state of British oligarchy is the Leveson inquiry. It hasn't revealed corruption and avarice on anything but a mundane scale; few outright monsters have emerged; there is as yet no smoking gun.  What it has revealed is the complacency, passivity and reckless negligence of those who thought they were doing nothing wrong. Th econgestion of British public life, its squeezed, banal, thoughtless, easy way with power, its acquiescence in its own straitened quality; its thin conception of the public good, its sense of comfort with its own limited ambitions have all been on daily display.  It's nothing dramatic.....Ministers don't do anything nefarious. They simply don't know what's being done in their departments and they don't have any real incentive to find out. Murdoch doesn't know what's going on in his company either, and he too has no incentive to find out.  Confusion and inattention are all our kind of oligarchy needs.

The Economist on the Greek default

Other aspects of the restructuring are more troubling. One is that the European Central Bank (ECB) was able to sidestep a coercive write-down of its Greek bonds, acquired as part of a programme to stabilise bond markets in troubled euro-zone countries. That will undermine its power to stop future market panic through bond purchases, since investors now know that the larger the ECB holding of a country’s bonds is, the bigger the write-down private investors would suffer in a restructuring.

Gavekal on the coming Eurozone balance of payments crisis

Over the past two years, the euro crisis has morphed from a sovereign crisis in a peripheral country (Greece), to a banking crisis, and back to a sovereign crisis in core countries (Italy, Spain). At every turn a "solution" is devised whose purpose is to "save" the euro but whose actual result is simply to push the crisis into new and more desperate terrain. The latest solution - aggressive easing by the ECB - means that the next phase of the euro disaster will be a balance of payments crisis. Indeed, the ECB's change of operating procedures undeniably "solves" last year's problem of eurozone governments financing themselves. But what kind of solution is it when, as Jacques Rueff put it 50 years ago, the ECB's move amounts to "financing expenditures which have no return with money that does not exist"? The highest-odds scenario is thus that the bloated eurozone public sector, having guaranteed its financing for the next three years, will stop all effort at reform, and that the southern European countries will become even less competitive than they are now. In turn this means that -- barring a collapse in oil prices -- their dollar trade deficits will grow larger and that a classic balance of payments crisis is thus right around the corner.

So far, this crisis has not materialized because of the generosity of the Fed, whose swap lines already total US$100bn. To all intents and purposes, the Fed is now financing not only the US budget deficit but also the southern European trade deficits, while the ECB gets to carry the exchange rate and solvency risks. (This Fed-dependence carries a delicious historical irony: one of the prime goals of the euro architects was to create a powerful alternative to the dollar, ensuring that Eurocrats would never again be subservient to Washington. Yet today, thanks to the euro, Europe must go cap in hand to Washington to stay solvent).

Mark Lilla on Americans' politics

Americans' assumptions about human nature are basically liberal today. We take it for granted that we are born free, that we constitute society, it doesn't constitute us, and that together we legitimately govern ourselves. Most intellectuals who call themselves conservatives today accept as self-evident the truths enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, which no traditional European conservative could. They are go-slow, curb-your-enthusiasm liberals like Tocqueville, not conservatives like Burke or T.S.Eliot or Michael Oakeshott. As for those like Congressman Ron Paul, who promote a minimal state and an unregulated economy, their libertarianism is actually a mutation of liberalism, not conservatism.

Mark Lilla on Fascists

Fascists hated so many aspects of modern society - representative democracy, capitalism, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, bourgeois refinement - that we forget that they were anything but nostalgic for Church and Crown. There was nothing conservative about them.