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• Genghis the globaliser
  

  How Genghis Khan's armies created the modern world

  HISTORY is famously about "maps and chaps" while economics has become obsessed with graphs and Greek letters. In a splendidly ambitious new book, two economists, one at Columbia University and the other at Trinity College, Dublin, attempt to link the two, in a 1,000-year history of world trade.

  For much of the past millennium, they argue, "the pattern of trade can only be understood as being the outcome of some military or political equilibrium between contending powers." This was as true of Genghis Khan, whose rampages across the steppes led to the pax Mongolica that allowed Eurasian trade to flourish in the 13th century, as it was of the British empire which imposed free trade on large parts of Asia and Africa. Trade expansion has tended to come "from the barrel of a Maxim gun, the edge of a scimitar, or the ferocity of nomadic horsemen". ...

• A dove departs
  

  A politician who paid the price for telling Israelis unpalatable truths

  ABROAD he has a reputation as a tireless peacemaker; at home he is a byword for political failure. When Yossi Beilin announced his decision to step down as head of the left-liberal Meretz party at its next leadership election in the spring, there were palpable sighs of relief not just from his rivals but also from his friends, who hope that he still has a chance to be remembered for his bold statesmanship instead of his defective leadership.

  Mr Beilin was one of the first mainstream Israeli politicians to push for what most Israelis now accept: the need to give the Palestinians an independent state. And it was largely thanks to him that serious peace talks first got going. In the early 1990s, when Israel was talking to local Palestinian leaders in an attempt to circumvent the exiled Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organisation in Tunis, Mr Beilin argued as a youthful deputy foreign minister that without Arafat, whom most Israelis dismissed as an incorrigible terrorist, peace talks would be worthless. With the backing of Shimon Peres, he encouraged the secret meetings in Oslo between an Arafat aide and two Israeli peace activists that led eventually to the famous handshake between Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn. ...

• Ruler of the river
  

  A list of the biggest salmon caught since the 18th century is an unexpected hit

  THE silvery Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) speaks to two of man's most basic instincts: the need to hunt and the need to tell stories. This may help explain why a lavish, illustrated account of the biggest salmon ever caught has become one of the surprise bestsellers of the season. Constable, the independent British publisher that brought out the weighty volume, exhausted its first print run of 5,000 in just a month, while a special edition, priced at GBP650 ($1,311), sold out before it was even ready to be shipped. ...

• On spelling, universities, ships, Britain, Bangladesh, pigs, German words
  

  SIR - Your article on education described how some industrialised countries are finding it difficult to improve standards despite substantial increases in spending on schools ("The race is not always to the richest", December 8th). One factor often overlooked when trying to raise standards is the spelling systems of languages, which can make it very hard for some children to learn to read and write. Finland and South Korea perform consistently well in education tests. It helps that their languages have spelling systems that make learning to read and write exceptionally easy.

  English spelling is uniquely complex. Because it spells many sounds differently it has at least twice as many spellings than any other alphabetic system. But learning to read English is made even harder by the many spellings that also have different pronunciations: on/only/once; ear/early/bear; food/good/flood. That is why most English-speaking children can be slow at learning to read unless they get substantial one-to-one help from parents or teachers. ...

• Unleash the war on terroir
  

  An oenological wish-list for the drinking season

  FOR the beleaguered winemakers of France, threats come in many guises. One French grower complained that each bottle of New World wine that lands in Europe is a "bomb targeted at the heart of our rich European culture". But few things agitate French winemakers more than other winemakers' unspeakable irreverence towards the terroir, the mix of soil and climate found in the place where a vine is grown. The strength of feeling is so great that the country even has its own breed of, er, terroiristes. A group of masked, militant French winemakers has attacked foreign tankers of wine, bricked up a public building and caused small explosions at supermarkets.

  Now France's balaclava-clad winemakers have a new horror to see off: transgenic wine. Scientists have unpicked the genetic secrets of pinot noir, the grape that produces some of the world's finest wines and also contributes to some blends of champagne (see article). It turns out to be the offspring of two very different parent varieties--they have less genetic material in common, in fact, than humans do with chimpanzees. The researchers' findings, which cast light on the origins of pinot noir's subtle flavours, will make it easier to engineer new varieties that can grow in places where cultivation is impractical today. Efforts to create transgenic grapevines are well advanced, and transgenic wine yeasts are already starting to appear in American winemaking. ...

• For all its flaws, an example to others
  

  The example Kenya can set for South Africa and the rest of the continent

  IN AFRICA, a hard-fought but fair election in a pivotal country is an example-setting event. No, this is not South Africa, where the election of Jacob Zuma as president of the ruling African National Congress on December 18th dealt a shattering blow to his rival, Thabo Mbeki. Although this puts Mr Zuma in a strong position to lead South Africa when Mr Mbeki's second term as president ends in April 2009, his succession is far from certain (see article). In Kenya on December 27th, however, power may very well change hands after the tightest electoral contest in the country's history.

  Kenya may not be as sexy as South Africa, but as a haven of stability and prosperity in eastern Africa the quality of its democracy matters. Its northern and western neighbours--Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda and Somalia--suffer in various degrees from war, tribal conflict, government repression, separatism and all that follows. From the countries of the war-ravaged Great Lakes region, such as Congo and Rwanda, Nairobi appears an oasis of calm. But this success is relative. Kenya itself has long been beset by bad governance, corruption and tribalism. Despite receiving billions of dollars of aid, most of its 35m people remain poor. True, few countries have had to contend with the ethnic complexity of Kenya, which has more than 40 recognised tribes. Nor does erratic weather help a largely rural economy. But the main culprit is a system of politics in which a ruling class has hogged most of the cake for itself. ...

• In praise of the primaries
  

  Iowa and New Hampshire perform a vital function

  IT IS easy to make fun of Iowa and New Hampshire. These two states, with a combined population of 4.3m mostly white people, will soon kick off the 2008 primary season (see article)--and also influence the presidential race out of any possible proportion to their size. Ethanol subsidies for greedy farmers, bleak midwinter meetings in rural diners, humourless men in lumberjack shirts: all come in for their share of ribbing. What an absurd way to choose a president, sneer many non-Americans, perhaps forgetting their own arrangements (the coronation of Gordon Brown as Labour leader and prime minister, without a single vote, springs to mind).

  In fact, the primaries system, once again, is working pretty well. There is a basic reason why Americans don't seem seriously interested in challenging the position of the kick-off states: in the end, it doesn't really matter which states start the ball rolling, so long as they are small. For the past four months or so, and now at a hysterical pitch, America's presidential candidates have been forced to campaign for their lives in these unlikely arenas. Slick TV ads alone will not cut it, as they must in bigger states where meeting more than a fraction of a percent of the electorate is an impossibility. Iowa and New Hampshire want their candidates up close and personal. ...

• Molecular gastronomy
  

  Explaining the science of the kitchen

  PARAETHYLPHENOL and paravinylphenol are two compounds essential to the flavour of well-aged burgundy. Herve This, the author of this odd but captivating little book and one o