'He wanted the government to develop Illinois, to make it a great state in which success would be open to anyone, poor or rich,' says Gabor Boritt, a Lincoln scholar at Gettysburg College.

The transfiguration from squalor to shrine sanitizes Lincoln's life story and in this way makes it harder for us to understand the intensity of his ideas about money. Lincoln knew the dead-end life of an undeveloped economy

One is not possible without the other. Thus it was not just virtuous but also necessary to fight the slave economy.

The new President, another slender fellow from Illinois, has been busy reading about Lincoln, quoting Lincoln, evoking Lincoln. The Lincoln Memorial was among Barack Obama's first stops in Washington.

No one is suggesting Darwinism has all the answers to social questions. Indeed, with some, such as the role of hierarchies, it suggests there is no definitive answer at all itself an important conclusion.

there is nothing particularly special about biologically based brands such as skin colour.

Many may harrumph at such a Darwinian interpretation of feminism, and say that it is a circuitous route to a traditional destination.

A Darwinian analysis of the matter cannot say where the equilibrium would lie in a world free from discrimination.

What goes for cheating goes for other bad behaviour, up to and including the murder of relatives and friends.

Evolution will favour the development of emotions that make such reactions automatic.

The study of the evolutionary roots of crime began with the work of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson

evolution probably explains why certain behaviours are deemed worthy of punishment.

For a Darwinian, life is about two things: survival and reproduction.

As the 150th anniversary of the publication of 'On The Origin of Species' approaches, the moment has come to ask how Darwin's insights can be used profitably by policymakers

by understanding better what makes people successful we should be able to produce more successful (and happy) people.

Mr Gladwell's concept of the tipping point, the moment when a trend flips into irreversible change, because it lends the power of apparent inevitability to almost any argument.

'The fight against corruption is a fight for democracy.'

This new form of corruption is changing the structure of the Russian economy.

Bribery and corruption have become endemic

THE easy flow of letters between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, two of America's greatest 20th-century poets, began in 1947, and continued for 30 years. It was a correspondence, from first to last, of an unusual intensity.

The message for policymakers and police officers is that clearing up graffiti or littering promptly could help fight the spread of crime.

When owners returned, their behaviour was secretly observed.

The idea that graffiti-spraying and other forms of low-level delinquency promote further bad behaviour has now been tested experimentally

Tarmo Pasto, a psychology professor, was the first person to preserve Ramirez's drawings.

The animating spirit of life in a psychiatric institution

Earlier theorists had instead assumed that firms herd together to benefit from some kind of 'spillover'.

A strong economic stylist wins the Nobel prize

Mauritius imports most of its food and energy, so rising world prices are pushing up inflation.

An isolated island continues to reinvent itself and confound the sceptics

Guards were bawling at them to get out of the way, but nobody paid the slightest attentio