The new government is facing daunting economic challenges. The historically minded will recall that the international financial crisis hit in 1931, two years after the start of the great depression, aborting the recovery and forcing Britain off the gold standard. A double-dip recession is a distinct possibility today; and the government's finances are in a mess. Ministers will have to think hard, and thinking is usually helped by reading. Since they have little time to read long books having taken office, here are four short reads to help them learn some lessons from this great recession. They will be particularly helpful to George Osborne.

Next Saturday world leaders meet in Washington to discuss new rules for the global financial system (though little will be achieved with President-elect Obama absent). So far, thinking about this matter has scarcely got beyond calls for better banking regulation: a microeconomic issue that is doubtless important but misses the main economic plot. The Bretton Woods system of 1944 was set up to "promote a stable system of exchange rates". This system has gone. But any new agreement, will need to be equally ambitious in addressing the problem of exchange rates, because the prevailing "non-system" has played a major role in the wild credit boom that has led to the financial crisis.

There is still time for Tony Blair to go out in a blaze of glory, if he spends the last six months of his premiership trying to repair the damage he has helped to cause in Iraq - an estimated 600,000 dead since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, 200,000 attributable to coalition action. The best hope for this ill-conceived military intervention was always that it might disrupt the malign routines of Middle Eastern politics sufficiently for something constructive to happen. With the humbling of the Anglo-American forces in Iraq, the defeat of Bush and Blair's insane ambition to remake the Muslim world in the west's image, and the restoration of some kind of balance of power in the Middle East, the time has come for a bold new initiative.

My battle with the Russian language has been going on for eight years, and is far from over. I was 56 when it started. My family were Russian, Jewish on my father's side, Christian on my mother's. The Skidelskys were "oligarchs" of the far east before the Revolution: my father was born in Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. One of my mother's ancestors, so family legend has it, had been signed up from Germany as a skilled workman by Peter the Great, and had prospered modestly. Both sides of the family had prudently left Russia in 1918.