Basket.

This week I had the chance to visit Mowbray Camp - otherwise known as SAF Detention Barracks. It is, of course, a good kilometre off the main road and in the middle of a considerable patch of wilderness. There are two layers of wire fencing around it, topped with menacing coils of concertina wire and located on a treacherous slope. Ferocious German shepherds stand ready to chase down any foolhardy would-be escapee. The message is clear: no one gets out before their term ends.

We were there, of course, to pick up an upstanding constituent whose only crime, as they say, was to get caught. With any luck we'll be sending in someone a lot more deserving soon. The lesson to all is that if you want to fuck with the system, do it well, or don't try.

That little excursion aside, I can summarise Paul Kennedy's 900-page (with an amazing two hundred pages of references, acknowledgements and endnotes) book in one sentence:

"It's the economy, stupid!"

Albeit one used to devastating effect by Clinton-Gore '92.

Indeed, his thesis is that economic power is the most important power of all, and it is the economic strength of a nation that determines its global status and standing. This is not a new idea; Cicero did say that "The sinews of war is infinite money", after all. Yet no other text I have seen about has managed to put so much heart-breaking analysis into this hyposthesis, going through five centuries of Great Power trials and tribulations to bring us an illuminating work that is highly agreeable.