Mark Archer

The story of the Black Hole of Calcutta was once as familiar to schoolchildren as the battle of Hastings or the Gunpowder Plot. On 20 June 1756, after a fierce battle lasting several days, in which the British defensive force of 515 men had held out against an Indian army numbering tens of thousands, 146 survivors — men, women and children — were locked into a room that measured 14 ft by 18 ft. The room had only two small, high, barred windows for air. The monsoon had not yet broken and the temperature would not have fallen below 100 F all night. When the door was opened in the morning, all but 23 had died from suffocation and thirst.

When banking families fell out in Renaissance Florence, disputes tended not to be settled by the financial regulator. In April 1478 in Florence cathedral, members of the Pazzi family murdered Giuliano Medici and came close to killing Lorenzo the Magnificent himself. Several of the Pazzi conspirators were hanged and left to dangle from the windows of the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of Florentine government. Ever the art patron, Lorenzo commissioned Botticelli, the Florentine master, to depict the hanged conspirators in lifelike frescoes on a government building. The paintings were only removed after the expulsion of the Medici from Florence in 1494. The origin of the dispute arose when the Pazzi were about to receive a windfall inheritance from a female cousin.

James Surowiecki is a Martian. True, he doesn’t have pointy ears and he writes a financial column for the New Yorker. But only someone fallen to Earth would celebrate the obvious as much as he does. When he ventures out into a city, he marvels at the fact that fast-walking pedestrians don’t bump into each other on a crowded pavement. He calls it ‘the beauty of a well- co-ordinated crowd’. When he goes into a supermarket in search of orange juice, there’s the juice carton ready and waiting for him! How did the grocer know he was coming? And how does he know he’ll want some more juice tomorrow? He compares supermarket supply chains to the spontaneous movements of a flock of starlings.

Judging from his publications, since semi-retiring from his hedge fund empire George Soros has sorted out the world’s problems at the rate of about one a year: George Soros on Globalisation, Soros on Global Capitalism, Soros on Democracy, Soros on the Soviet System. Does the man have hobbies? Can we expect Soros on Pigeon-fancying, or Soros on Creating Small Formal Gardens? Hardly. Soros is on a mission. He helped topple John Major’s government when his hedge fund activity sent Sterling crashing out of the ERM. Now he is after bigger game. ‘I have made it my primary objective to persuade the American public to reject President Bush in the forthcoming elections.’ Soros not only helps to overthrow tyrants; he can nation-build too.