Who reads the Economist and why? At Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple describes it as “intellectual seriousness for middle management and MBAs”, its writers and editors arrogant and its style dull. Its one saving grace? It is comprehensible, a quality not to be taken for granted. Just take those academic journals for whom “prestige is conferred by impenetrability, where truth and knowledge are kept as secret gardens that would be defiled by the presence of the uninitiated”.

For example…