Paul Seabright

Did I miss something, or was Christopher Hitchens’s rubbishing of the claim that ‘sexual conduct’ has ‘little to do with leadership capabilities’ unsupported by any of the evidence in the rest of his piece about Kennedy? The article amasses such overwhelming reasons to despise Kennedy on familiarly political grounds that it’s puzzling why Hitchens thinks anything is added by the sneer that...

Michael Byers’s article on the lessons of Seattle (LRB, 6 January) managed to add to the already voluminous confusion on this subject, as much by what it did not say as what it did. It began with an accurate account of the way the WTO has failed sufficiently to advance the aspirations of the world’s poorest countries. It concluded with an approving nod to ‘the rise in power … of individual...

Multinationals are a complex and troubling feature of modern society, but they will not go away and it is not remotely desirable that they should. They wield a lot of political influence, some bad and some good. They are the theatre for much of the comedy and tragedy of personal life at the turn of the millennium. They also transmit knowledge and skills across frontiers and generations. They value...

I was gloomily unsurprised to learn from Chris Miller (Letters, 29 November 2001) that the UK is even more densely packed with sites stocked with poisons and explosives than is France. The fact that Toulouse is a relatively safe place makes the recent explosion here all the more disturbing. Until 11 September public policy sought to secure aircraft against accidents and sabotage by the prudent, but...

Since he first ran in a Presidential election in 1974, Jean-Marie Le Pen has been telling his audiences that the French political classes are lying to them. He is not wrong. Mainstream politicians of all parties have maintained, even more than in most other industrial democracies, a pas devant les enfants approach to difficult issues of all kinds, including the funding of political parties, economic...