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Liberty is a fragile thing. For thousands of years, civilisations have risen, flourished and fallen, and most of them have been rigid, brutal and despotic. Freedom for the masses is a historical rarity. It arises only as the product of a fine balance between competing interests. That balance is the subject of this book.

Institute Director James Robinson reflects on the difficulty of changing a society and its institutions thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In 1588 Queen Elizabeth I promised that if the Spanish Armada reached these shores she would take up arms herself. “I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman,” she told her troops, “but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a King of England too.” Now a study has revealed that the central premise of her pep talk was flawed. Female monarchs have historically been far more aggressive than their male equivalents. The research, which analysed 400 years of European history, found that queens were more likely to start wars than kings. They seem to have been better at fighting them too.