Many of his French colleagues found him too much: noisy, mischievous, attached to no school (though he had sat at the feet of both Henri Lefebvre and Roland Barthes in his feverish years at Nanterre, when teaching had been interrupted by clouds of tear-gas and cobblestone-throwing).

ECONOMIST: Jean Baudrillard

Quite a contrast to that feverish day nearly three years ago when another software outfit, Red Hat, rose 272% on its first day.

FORBES: R-E-S-P-E-C-T

This combination of feeble production and feverish consumption, the argument runs, means that demand for commodities will outpace supply for years to come.

ECONOMIST: Commodities