Mansa Musa never spoke in public, and whispered everything to an interpreter; he was also never allowed to be seen eating a meal.
Kwasi Kwarteng
We are often told that capitalism is in crisis, but look around the world and you'll see that it has never been so buoyant.
Of all the meals that represented British culture, perhaps none captured the imagination more than the Christmas pudding. It was the Victorians who firmly fixed the traditional plum pudding as a festive dish.
It's often been said that conservatism is successful because it chimes with these basic human instincts. It's time for us to ask fundamental questions about what the Conservative Party is for, and what it actually believes.
I think interventions tend to be wrong. That doesn't mean to say that every intervention has been a disaster, but it does mean that generally they tend to screw up.
The name Noel Skelton is largely forgotten today, but his legacy in the Conservative Party in the 20th century was enormous.
In Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Angola and Cameroon maize is a staple, yet the earliest mention of maize in west Africa comes from a Portuguese document that lists it as being loaded on to slave ships bound for Africa.
Cutting VAT is a classic case of shutting the stable door, when the horse has already galloped a couple of furlongs down the road.
But while the British empire is easy to write about, it is very difficult to summarise. This is because what we call 'empire' spans 400 years in time and thousands of miles in space; every continent on Earth was directly affected by it.
In fact, the fast-changing, dynamic character of London makes perpetual Labour domination unlikely. Things are so fast-moving it would be impossible to say what the situation might look like in five years, let alone 10 or 15.
The British in South Africa always portrayed themselves as more enlightened and tolerant than the 'narrow-minded', 'intolerant' Boers.
From the start of her leadership of the Conservative party in February 1975, Thatcher's style seemed shrill and uncompromising, and she became an easy object of mockery. When she left office nearly 16 years later, she was a widely recognised, but clearly still highly controversial, figure.
The extent to which lawyers and judges are interfering in politics is something that concerns many people.
One good outcome of elections is that fresh talent comes into the House of Commons.
Aspiration, opportunity, and a stake in society are things which combine education, decent healthcare and the fruits of a capitalist system where individuals contribute to society, while also pursuing their natural inclination to improve their lot in life.
I've always thought my main concern is to alleviate the burdens on people, who were earning less money, perhaps than £80,000.
Using food as a way of understanding empire is highly effective. Food knows no barriers of race, gender or even time.
For the British working class, the restrictions of conflict actually improved their diet. Under Lord Woolton, the minister for food, a programme of free school meals was introduced. Priority supplies of milk were provided for pregnant women and nursing mothers, while orange juice, milk and cod liver oil were given to the under-fives.
Margaret Thatcher was Britain's most controversial modern politician.
Mrs Thatcher not only made history by becoming Britain's first female prime minister, she was the first woman to hold any comparable position in the western world.
The contrast between a figure such as Mark Zuckerberg, a billionaire before he was 30, and Alfred Krupp, who spent 60 years building one of the biggest manufacturing concerns in the world, is striking.
There seems to be no end of books about the British empire, and the fascination it holds for historians of all descriptions is inexhaustible.
Any book on empire will omit, by necessity, vast tracts of the imperial experience, and so critics can easily find facts and details to contradict an author's bold generalisations.
If you are a borrower, the more you borrow, the more it costs.
I don't see how a lowering of VAT helps much, in terms of stimulus. VAT is a form of sales tax. It gets paid when you spend. A stimulus should put money in your pocket before you have actually spent the money.
The idea that, in the age of Google, Facebook and the internet, government can control the 'commanding heights' of the economy is one of the great delusions of our age. Modern techonology, social media, the explosion of online retail, among many other things, have meant that governments have less and less control.
Clearly, for capitalism to work properly we must expect some upward normalisation of interest rates at some future point, to provide greater incentive for savers to save and investors to invest.
Conservatives should never be shy in promoting a strong case for individual enterprise. We should acknowledge where the system doesn't work, and seek to amend it.
I remember being told after the 1992 general election that Labour could never win a majority in Britain ever again.
It's the easiest thing in the world to assume that what seems so obvious at one moment in time is a hard, perpetual fact of life.
The bull market, rising prices, earning lots of money, make it seem as if the good days will never end. When prices are falling and there is a recession, that also feels as though it will last for ever. Politics is the same. People simply can't imagine changing circumstances.
Frontrunners always attract envy, and a desperate campaign to stop them in their tracks.
In our media-driven age, the mere fact of having name recognition is a big advantage. When the leadership election was confined only to Conservative MPs, relatively obscure figures could emerge quickly.
History is of all subjects the one which is most engaged with people's perceptions of themselves, identity, politics, all those things which shape the modern world.
The idea that historians aren't affected by what goes on around them I think is slightly fanciful.
I think that running empires as a way of ordering the world is a flawed model.
