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defeated Germany too hard. Indeed, the famous Marshall Plan helped to rebuild the German economy and trigger its remarkable post-war drive to prosperity and stability – a prosperity and stability which played a major part in undermining the attractions of communism in the east of Europe, and so helped to bring about the end of the Cold War.
    People criticise the ineffectiveness of the United Nations, or its domination by the big nations of the Security Council, and yet the establishment of an international forum where nations can air their grievances before going to war is a lesson learned from history. Of course there have been many wars, large and small, since the Second World War – including the Korean, Vietnamese, Iran–Iraq and Gulf wars – and the UN itself has overseen the initiation of somewars, such as the Kosovan conflict, the Afghan war and the invasion of Iraq.
    However, it is entirely plausible to argue that the devastation of the two world wars has at least made the major powers stop to think before reacting to issues with a declaration of war, and may have kept conflicts regional rather than global. The rivalry between the Soviet Union and the USA during the Cold War, for instance, never escalated beyond the regional in a way such a rivalry might have done earlier. And it may be that the experience of the horror of the atomic bomb attacks on Japan in 1945 has been behind the determination of the major powers to avoid nuclear war or even major warfare – though of course the moral drawn by some of the American and Russian military from Hiroshima and Nagasaki was also that nuclear weapons are so powerful that they cannot afford to be without their own ‘superior’ versions. And here we come to the heart of this question.
    History is nothing more than the story of the past, and there are as many interpretations of it as there people telling the story. It is certainly worth studying history to learn, in simplistic terms, from our mistakes, but there is not one single history teaching one clear lesson. The lesson many Germans learned from their defeat in the First World War was not to avoid war in future but to make sure they won the next time. Each of us draws our own lessons from history, and applies them in our own way.
    And this leads to another problem raised by this question. Who is learning the lessons? Is it individual people? Is it politicians? Is it generals? Is it nations? And how do they put what they have learned into practice in a world that might fundamentally disagree with them, or simply have an entirely different agenda? Ultimately, then, it’s impossible to say if history, or rather lessons learned from history, can stop the next potential war; the responsibility belongs to myriad people and events in the here and now. This is not to say that studying history can teach us nothing. No, history may just provide the vital insights to the right people at the right moment that make it possible to avoid going down the same terrible path to war again. As Machiavelli said, ‘Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.’

Where does honesty fit into law?
    (Law, Cambridge)
    Lawyers have so long been lampooned for their slipperiness and skill at exploiting legal niceties regardless of the truth that it’s tempting to say ‘nowhere’. Crooked or devious lawyers have been the stuff of stories for centuries.In the words of the eighteenth-century English poet and dramatist John Gay:
    I know you lawyers can with ease

Twist words and meanings as you please;

That language, by your skill made pliant,

Will bend to favour every client.
    And of course there is an element of truth in this. Lawyers are often employed by clients to find a way to use the law to