The new sage of Wall Street

Profile: The trader turned author Nassim Nicholas Taleb has emerged as the guru of the global financial meltdown

Fictional financial disasters quiz

The stock markets are in free fall and workers are being laid off in the city. Why not cheer yourself up by testing your knowledge of fictional financial disasters?

Rich pickings

Polly Toynbee: The government's silence on Britain's corporate excess must be challenged: only then will it be able to move towards a fairer society

Eaten up

Ed Pilkington talks to the soothsayer of agro-economics, Raj Patel, about what will happen when the food finally runs out

Harry Potter breaks 400m in sales

The sales figures for the Harry Potter series have long dwarfed that of most other books, excepting of course the Bible, but with news that JK Rowling's magical tales have topped 400m worldwide, it seems possible that the boy wizard might be catching up

Our diet of destruction

In an extract from her new book, Felicity Lawrence investigates the faceless trading giants who really decide what goes on our plates

Drop that spoon!

Britain is one of the world's largest consumers of puffed, flaked and sugared breakfast cereals. How did that happen when many were said to contain less nutrition than the boxes they come in? Felicity Lawrence investigates

The gods of greed

In the first of three extracts from their new book, Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson explain how the reckless speculation of a super-rich elite has left us all the poorer