Malcolm Bull

Global inequality has become one of the forms of the statistical sublime. There is a strange pleasure to be had from discovering that the top 0.5 per cent of the world population owns 35.6 per cent of global wealth, while the bottom 68.4 per cent controls a mere 4.2 per cent; or that the richest thousand or so billionaires are worth more than one and a half billion of the world’s...

For the benefit of anyone who has spent the past decade or so on a different planet, the most frequently asked questions about climate change on this one are as follows. Is it getting warmer? Yes, surface temperatures have risen by 0.8°C from pre-industrial levels. Are humans causing it? Almost certainly. The gases produced by industrialisation and agriculture are known to have an insulating effect, and their concentration in the earth’s atmosphere has increased in line with rising temperatures, while natural causes of global warming have remained constant. Will it get warmer still? Very probably, though no one can accurately predict when or by how much.

No man is an island; unless, Donne might have added, he becomes a whale: ‘Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were.’ But even if the whole feels the loss of a part, the part may not feel the loss of the whole. It is what happens to the clod or the promontory that counts, and...

‘It is not too fanciful to suppose that “posterity”, in the year 2032, will be celebrating the events of November 1917 as a happy turning point in the history of human freedom, much as we celebrate the events of July 1789.’ Not too fanciful, in 1932, for Carl Becker, the American historian who first cast a quizzical eye over the utopian designs of the Enlightenment in

Waking to find myself a touch genocidal, I would, I imagine, be uncertain how to proceed. An unprovoked attack on my target group with whatever weapon came to hand might take out a few of them, but also bring my venture to a premature end. Reflecting that few are lucky enough to be in a position to do the job themselves, I could either confine myself to advocacy, or else embark on the difficult and protracted business of getting into a position in which I could expect others to obey my orders.