Monetary policy is the most recondite yet most pervasive and powerful of economic forces.

FORBES: Fiat Money: The Root Cause Of Our Financial Disaster

For example, several people make the point that even the most complicated and recondite ideas have some easy-to-express core.

FORBES: A Beautiful Sausage

But their juxtaposition provides even the hardened student with some new perspectives, and there are useful if brief looks at more recondite questions such as Israel's relations with the Gulf states.

ECONOMIST: Israel and Palestine without peace

As a non-mathematician, he appreciates the difficulty of explaining a recondite mathematical problem to a general audience, and gives a vivid account both of the passion that mathematicians have for their subject and of the fascination for this particular problem.

ECONOMIST: Mathematics

The web will transform our lives by knowing what each of us eats, drinks, reads and where we go on holiday, and many more of our secret wishes and recondite idiosyncracies, as we surrender control of our being to an uncontrollable entity.

ECONOMIST: Letters