Lex is the FT's agenda-setting column on business and financial topics. It covers everything from individual companies, their strategies and their management to global macro-economic matters and aims to write regularly about all manner of sectors, markets and current themes. These days, Lex is truly worldwide, both in its coverage and in its writers, who are based in Asia, Europe and the US.

How did Lex get its name? The mystery died with Hargreaves Parkinson, the man who conceived the column for the Financial News in the 1930s and took it to the FT when the two merged, becoming the editor of the enlarged Financial Times. But one explanation is that it derives from the phrase "De minimis non curat lex" ("The law is not concerned with trifles") and was intended as a gibe at a rival column signed "Autolycus" -- Shakespeare's "snapper-up of unconsidered trifles".

The first Lex column to appear in the FT was on Monday, October 1, 1945.

Since then, the column has developed a sharp and authoritative voice on corporate and financial matters. In its early days, there were no financial analysts, so Lex filled a need for critical and acerbic analysis of company results and strategies. Today, with analysts' independence under question from all sides, it still provides an impartial and unconflicted commentary.

The Lex team today - the column long ago abandoned the pretence of being the work of a single person - includes seven London-based writers, four located in New York and one in Tokyo.

Lex boasts some distinguished alumni - journalists, of course, including former FT editors Sir Gordon Newton and Richard Lambert, but also many who have gone on to make careers in business - such as Martin Taylor, former chief executive of Barclays Bank, John Gardiner, former chairman of Tesco, and John Makinson, chairman and chief executive of Penguin. Both Nigel Lawson, chancellor of the exchequer under Margaret Thatcher, and his son Dominic, the former newspaper editor, have worked on the column.

The estimated readership of the Lex Column is 1.3m and research shows that almost two-thirds of FT readers read Lex every day.