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In the seventeenth century, under a succession of outstandingly able soldier kings, Sweden had been a great power but after the death in 1718 of Karl XII, the last and most monomaniacal of the line, the country had become a by-word for weak government, corruption and impotence. Gustav III set himself the task of making Sweden great again. He was assassinated in March 1792 – the third Swedish monarch in 160 years to die of gunshot wounds

Under Karl XII’s successors, his central-German brother-in-law Fredrik I and his north-German second-cousin-once-removed Adolf Fredrik (Prince Bishop of Lubeck before the Swedish Riksdag chose him to be Fredrik’s heir) the country passed through the so-called Age of Liberty

When, shortly after his father’s death in February 1771, Gustav III met his uncle Frederick II of Prussia (Frederick the Great), the latter sneered, ‘If there were Swedes in Sweden they would soon agree to bury their differences; but foreign corruption has so perverted the national spirit that harmony was impossible’. Gustav’s new kingdom was then the second largest in Europe after Russia. It comprised present-day Finland as well as Sweden, and a toe-hold in Germany in northern Pomerania.

For almost 30 centuries—from its unification around 3100 B.C. to its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.—ancient Egypt was the preeminent civilization in the Mediterranean world

Neolithic (late Stone Age) communities in northeastern Africa exchanged hunting for agriculture and made early advances that paved the way for the later development of Egyptian arts and crafts, technology, politics and religion (including a great reverence for the dead and possibly a belief in life after death).

agriculture (largely wheat and barley) formed the economic base of the Egyptian state. The annual flooding of the great Nile River provided the necessary irrigation and fertilization each year; farmers sowed the wheat after the flooding receded and harvested it before the season of high temperatures and drought returned.

at the beginning of 2022, many of us shared the assumptions of Keynes’s Londoner. We ordered exotic goods in the confident expectation that Amazon would deliver them to our doors the next day. We invested in emerging-market stocks, purchased Bitcoin, and chatted with people on the other side of the world via Zoom. Many of us dismissed Covid-19 as a temporary suspension of our global lifestyle. Vladimir Putin’s “projects and politics of militarism” seemed like diversions in the loonier regions of the Twittersphere. 

just as World War I mattered for reasons beyond the slaughter of millions of human beings, this conflict could mark a lasting change in the way the world economy works — and the way we all live our lives, however far we are from the carnage in Eastern Europe.

That doesn’t mean that globalization is an unalloyed good. By its nature, economic liberalism exaggerates the downsides of capitalism as well as the upsides: Inequality increases, companies sever their local roots, losers fall further behind, and — without global regulations — environmental problems multiply

Imagine if you were middle-aged in 1948. You’d have lived through a worldwide influenza pandemic, two world wars and an economic depression all within the space of about 40 years. Life seemed fragile. It felt like anything could happen. Nothing seemed secure.

I was born two years after Auden’s Pulitzer, in 1950. The feeling was that even if there were, say, an economic downturn, things would be better afterward than they had been before. We just assumed that our lives and society were going to get better and better. There was a long period in the second half of the 20th century, in which the anxiety that had defined the first half went away. For a couple generations we lived largely free of insecurity about the world in which we lived.

Christian distinctives push against culture. But then we go into the culture with our hope. We simply try to be Christians in the culture, living with integrity and compassion

The tale of the lotus-eating elites destroying the honest and authentic life of the hardworking commoners is a hell of a story, and it is rooted in the reality of actual human suffering. But as a criticism of liberal democracy, it is not new and it is not true.

When was this fortunate time when people back in our respective hometowns felt that the system was fair, or that times were good, or that the “elites”—back in the ’60s and ’70s, old Protestant white males who were practically selected before birth to attend fine universities—were somehow invested in the success of the lower classes?

Not many Americans want to think very much about what it would actually mean in social or economic terms to go back and live in those Kodachrome moments in their minds.

the climate crisis is outpacing our emotional capacity to describe it

I can’t say precisely when the end began, just that in the past several years, “the end of the world” stopped referring to a future cataclysmic event and started to describe our present situation

Across the ironized hellscape of the internet, we began “tweeting through the apocalypse” and blogging the Golden Globes ceremony “during the end times” and streaming “Emily in Paris” “at the end of the world.”

When you do it once, it’s just a victory. When you do it twice, it’s a realignment.The coalition that Barack Obama put together to win the presidency handily in 2008 looked a lot like the emerging Democratic majority that optimistic liberals had been discerning on the political horizon since the 1990s. It was the late George McGovern’s losing coalition from 1972 finally come of age: Young voters, the unmarried, African-Americans, Hispanics, the liberal professional class – and then more than enough of the party’s old blue collar base to hold the Rust Belt for the Democrats.But 2008 was also a unique political moment, when George W. Bush’s immense unpopularity was compounded by a financial collapse, and when the possibility of electing the country’s first black president fired the imagination of the nation (and the nation’s press corps). So it was still possible to regard the Obama majority of ’08 as more flukish than transformative – or at the very least, to see it as a fragile thing, easily shattered by poor choices and adverse developments.

the lesson of the election is that the Obama coalition was truly vulnerable only to a Republican Party that took Obama seriously as an opponent – that understood how his majority had been built, why voters had joined it and why the conservative majority of the Reagan and Bush eras had unraveled.Such understanding eluded the Republicans this year.

In part, that failure can be blamed on their standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, who mostly ran as a kind of vanilla Republican instead of showing the imagination necessary to reinvent his party for a new era.

the real star of the book, the ubershaper of everything, is this “age of fear” that has so warped our institutions and policy priorities. Will it ever go away or will bin Laden be forever that gift that keeps on giving?

the focus on terrorism, combined with our gotcha politics, has “killed creative thinking” in Washington, let alone anything “aspirational” in our foreign policy.

This was a mistake on many levels, Rothkopf insisted: “Not only did it produce the overreaction and excesses of the Bush years, but it also produced the swing in the opposite direction of Obama — who was both seeking to be the un-Bush and yet was afraid of appearing weak on this front himself”

The racial generation gap is technically measured as the difference between the percent of those 65 or older who are white, minus the percent of those aged 17 and younger who are white. The bigger the gap, the more demographically distinct the generations.

the problem is that when seniors have trouble seeing themselves in children and young adults, social cohesion is at risk, as are investments in the future.

in a clear sign of retreating from the future, Arizona also made the largest cuts in K-12 state spending per student between 2008 and 2015.

In many books and films, the prewar years appear as an age of prosperity and contentment in Europe, with the summer of 1913 featuring as the last golden summer.

But today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day.

In the early 20th century, the popularity of social Darwinism had created a consensus that nations should be seen similarly to biological organisms, which risked extinction or decay if they failed to expel alien bodies and achieve “living space” for their own citizens. Pseudo-scientific theories of biological difference between races posited a world in which all races were engaged in an international struggle for wealth and power

The vote will come seven weeks into Mr. Biden’s presidency, as the growing number of vaccine doses given to Americans offers hope that the country is on course to move beyond the worst of a pandemic that has killed more than half a million people in the United States.

Mr. McCarthy sought to equate the progressive policies in the bill with socialism, and said “House Democrats have abandoned any pretense of unity.”

The legislation establishes an aggressive effort by the new president to drive down poverty, as the measure offers substantial benefits for low-income Americans, including a sizable one-year expansion of the child tax credit.

Tech giants Microsoft and Alphabet/Google have seized a large lead in shaping our potentially A.I.-dominated future. This is not good news. History has shown us that when the distribution of information is left in the hands of a few, the result is political and economic oppression. Without intervention, this history will repeat itself.

The fact that these companies are attempting to outpace each other, in the absence of externally imposed safeguards, should give the rest of us even more cause for concern, given the potential for A.I. to do great harm to jobs, privacy and cybersecurity. Arms races without restrictions generally do not end well.

We believe the A.I. revolution could even usher in the dark prophecies envisioned by Karl Marx over a century ago. The German philosopher was convinced that capitalism naturally led to monopoly ownership over the “means of production” and that oligarchs would use their economic clout to run the political system and keep workers poor.

The Long Room, with its imposing oak ceiling and two levels of bookshelves laden with some of Ireland’s most ancient and valuable volumes, is the oldest part of the library in Trinity College Dublin, in constant use since 1732.

But that remarkable record is about to be disrupted, as engineers, architects and conservation experts embark on a 90 million euro, or $95 million, program to restore and upgrade the college’s Old Library building, of which the Long Room is the main part.

“We already knew that the Old Library needed work because of problems with the building,” said Prof. Veronica Campbell, who initiated the project. “When we saw Notre Dame burning, we realized, ‘Oh, my God, we need to do something now!’”

The image I had then of a golden future was a book-lined sitting-room with an old, unused piano and a fire crackling away in the grate. Cats (one had to be ginger) would saunter from room to room and there would occasionally be hints of some Elizabeth David-style French casserole wafting in from a distant kitchen.

books – covering every available surface – were the main thing: proof (at least it seemed then) of a life well spent.

I was at that age of being over-attuned to the books-you-had-to-have-read-in-life, and where to start? Whichever you chose, you always wished you were reading another. It was a bit like being a serial monogamist at an orgy – with devastatingly attractive if sometimes impenetrable sexual partners – and the very thing that should have brought you peace and enjoyment only agitated instead

Much of what we consider the American way of life is rooted in the period of remarkably broad, shared economic growth, from around 1900 to about 1978. Back then, each generation of Americans did better than the one that preceded it. Even those who lived through the Depression made up what was lost. By the 1950s, America had entered an era that economists call the Great Compression, in which workers — through unions and Social Security, among other factors — captured a solid share of the economy’s growth.

there’s a lot of disagreement about what actually happened during these years. Was it a golden age in which the U.S. government guided an economy toward fairness? Or was it a period defined by high taxes (until the early ’60s, the top marginal tax rate was 90 percent) and bureaucratic meddling?

the Great Compression gave way to a Great Divergence. Since 1979, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the bottom 80 percent of American families had their share of the country’s income fall, while the top 20 percent had modest gains. Of course, the top 1 percent — and, more so, the top 0.1 percent — has seen income rise stratospherically. That tiny elite takes in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income and controls nearly half its wealth.

It is one of fate’s cruel jokes that conservatism should be at its modern nadir just as the Republican Party is at its zenith — if conservatism is defined as embracing limited government, displaying a rational, skeptical and moderate temperament and believing in the priority of the moral order.

All these principles are related, and under attack

Conservatives believe that human beings are fallible and prone to ambition, passion and selfishness

“They should be hauled out of Congress and taken to Guantánamo!” a military veteran said of the few dozen elected officials — including Hillary Clinton and the only two Muslim members of Congress — identified in the film as having connections to terrorists. “Can’t we get a law passed so we can go in and get these people the hell out of our government?”

White and the filmmaker, Trevor Loudon, assured the group that there is “a new sheriff in town.”

Trump’s election has presented a “God-given opportunity,” Loudon said. “The fate of the Western world” now depends on how they use it.

In June the leader of Islamic State declared the creation of a caliphate stretching across parts of Syria and Iraq - Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi named himself the caliph or leader. Edward Stourton examines the historical parallels and asks what is a caliphate, and what is its appeal?

The last caliphate - that of the Ottomans - was officially abolished 90 years ago this spring. Yet in a 2006 Gallup survey of Muslims living in Egypt, Morocco, Indonesia and Pakistan, two-thirds of respondents said they supported the goal of "unifying all Islamic countries" into a new caliphate

"Seventy years after the Prophet's death, this Muslim world stretched from Spain and Morocco right the way to Central Asia and to the southern bits of Pakistan, so a huge empire that was all… under the control of a single Muslim leader," says historian Prof Hugh Kennedy. "And it's this Muslim unity, the extent of Muslim sovereignty, that people above all look back to."