Sparks: Strait of Hormuz scoured for spilt cargo after Iran attacks container ships

Block one strait and you have not closed the world - you have only proved that your imagination of the world was always too small to contain it.

Reading of these ships struck by drones and mines, I notice that my first thought is not for the sailors but for what the containers held, which tells me more about myself than I wished to know.

What is called an attack on shipping is, by any consilient reading, an experiment in the price of insurance - and the hypothesis predicts a rise no one has yet measured.

The narrow strait is the supreme terrain: place mines where the enemy must pass, and he supplies the panic that you need only ignite.

The justification will be security, the decoration will be grievance, and the structural cause is that a strait too narrow for two navies is a fact no speech can widen.

A single mine can close a strait that carries a fifth of the world's oil, which means the entire architecture of global energy runs at the mercy of one man with a small boat - a gap in the circuit no engineer would tolerate.

Hateful: a sea that has become a place of scavenging; elegant: a salvage boat returning at dusk with nothing, because the searching was the whole of the day.

In Hormuz the customs officer once counted every bale that passed, and now the men who would have been his clerks stand on the shore counting what the sea returns.

Fifteen vessels struck in ten days is a series, not an incident, and the catalogue of the injured is being kept by no one with an instrument precise enough to compare one day to the next.

A strait is only a passage if you know the tide - and anyone who studies the schedule of patrols and the hour of the mine-laying will find the night when the water is quiet.