Wealth is not only measured in monetary terms. There is much here in Standpoint that has endured over centuries: Ian Bostridge on Schubert and Blair Worden on Jonathan Bate’s Shakespeare; Mark Ronan on Euclid and Michael Prodger on Babylon and Byzantium. George Vass offers a Catholic theologian’s response to Geza Vermes’s historical view of Jesus. But there is novelty, too: from the embers of Simon Gray to the enigmas of W.G. Sebald; from Carlo Gébler’s narrative of prison life to Emma Sergeant’s luminous equestrian images – not to mention Clive James’s tribute to another kind of warhorse, Denis Healey, and Alain de Botton’s paean to the art of conversation

Even in the midst of financial turmoil, the West still needs defending. This month we have Michael Burleigh on pirates and Edward Lucas on Putin; Douglas Murray and Denis MacShane disagree over whether we should tolerate Holocaust deniers, while Amir Taheri reveals what happened when he challenged the Democrats over Barack Obama’s tergiversations on Iraq. Mr Obama emerges as a Chicago machine politician.

Even before the American presidential election had taken place, Sarah Palin was being blamed for the blunders of the McCain campaign by those on both sides who wish to smother her political career at birth. Here, Midge Decter unpicks the irrational reactions to the Palin phenomenon. But Mrs Palin will remain a force to be reckoned with; like Ronald Reagan before her, she defies the establishment that (as Melanie Phillips points out in this issue) has favoured appeasement ever since the 1930s. An Obama presidency might mean a relapse into that appeasing mentality, but the West is not bust yet.