Sublime

Unreasonable distributions of wealth have always turned their fire on reason.

Whenever elites find themselves threatened, their first reaction is denial. This

In a world of artificial reality and instantaneous transmission of everything everywhere, integrity of judgment and the ability to distinguish the true from the false will be even more important.

More meant

So removed had the British now become from their Indian subjects, and so dismissive were they of Indian opinion, that they had lost all ability to read the omens around them or to analyse their own position with any degree of accuracy. Arrogance and imperial self-confidence had diminished the desire to seek accurate information or gain any real kno

The classics were their comic books; they’d grown up on Plutarch’s Lives—“the bible for heroes,” as Emerson declared—and came of age with their heads buried in the adventures of Odysseus and Richard the Lionheart and Sigurd the Dragonslayer. They understood that in ancient Greece, entire wars could pivot on the performance of one or two extraordina

these major failings, which had an indelible impact on history’s unfolding, to the phenomenon that being great means being alone, which leads us to error since there is no one there to check our mistakes or balance our thinking. And that may be the case. But if there is one overriding aim of this book it is not just to call attention to errors like

traditional view that charging for loans was inherently unjust.

And the debate forged in mid-nineteenth-century Britain has shadowed the institution ever since: Is the company essentially a private association, subject to the laws of the state but with no greater obligation than making money, or a public one which is supposed to act in the public interest?