LONDON — Anthony Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain, published in 1962, was a profound and scholarly work that appeared at a time when the perception that the United Kingdom was in decline was undermining confidence in British institutions.

SALZBURG — In 2009, while the world economy was still reeling from the global financial crisis, Nobel laureate economist Robert Lucas observed that “everyone is a Keynesian in the foxhole”.

 LONDON — Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the driving force behind the campaign for the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, recently caused an uproar when he revealed that his bank accounts were closed two months earlier, al

LONDON — In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, scientist Victor Frankenstein famously uses dead body parts to create a hyperintelligent “superhuman” monster that, driven mad by human cruelty and isolation, ultimately turns on its creator.

LONDON — One of the regrettable consequences of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was the advent of the pseudoscience known as geopolitics.

LONDON — With investors pouring billions of dollars into artificial intelligence (AI)-related startups, the generative AI frenzy is beginning to look like a speculative bubble akin to the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s and the South Sea Bubble of the early eighteenth century.

LONDON — In 1969, the British financial journalist Samuel Brittan published a book called Steering the Economy: The Role of the Treasury.

LONDON — Is the world economy globalising or de-globalising? The answer would have seemed obvious in 1990. Communism had just collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe. In China, Deng Xiaoping was unleashing capitalist enterprise.

LONDON — In December 1939, police raided the home of George Orwell, seizing his copy of D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”.