James Buchan

“By pouring money and goods into devastated regions, foreign aid workers sometimes compound the disruption and debauch the survivors.”

“Viewed from a distance, or through the eye of the All-Knowing CEO of the Universe, the crash of 2008 followed the usual pattern. A long-lived boom driven by cheap credit, going back as far as 1982 (though subject to interruptions in the mid-1980s and 1990s, and in 2001), came to grief because of a rise in the cost of borrowing money.”

“For all their current prestige, Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers are still regarded in all but the most desperate districts of Gaza or Peshawar as romantics with little chance of more than symbolic victories, however bloody and brutal. That gives both the Middle East and the West a small and distant hope of security.”

“A century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity; today it is almost as vital to human existence as water.”

“Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born revolutionary who is believed by most Arab and Iranian observers to be the inspiration of the attacks in New York and Washington, is the best known of the Islamic militants to have emerged in the past 20 years and the least difficult to fathom.”

“If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.”

“Were there peace and justice in the Middle East, the Arabs would no more need their tinhorn dictators than they would their corpulent princes.”

“Losing your capital is like losing your trousers. It is a real humiliation, and one not to be soon repeated.”

“The aircraft that blew up the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington conveyed several messages to the world, of which one of the least remarked is this: the Muslims of the world are suffering.”

“Because bankers measure their self-worth in money, and pay themselves a lot of it, they think they're fine fellows and don't need to explain themselves.”

“In rising financial markets, the world is forever new. The bull or optimist has no eyes for past or present, but only for the future, where streams of revenue play in his imagination.”

“An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.”

“The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.”

“One of the admirable features of British novelists is that they have no scruple about setting their stories in foreign settings with wholly foreign personnel.”

“We read too much Shakespeare at school, and view our parliamentary politics as dynastic drama, in which an impatient crown prince frets at his long subordination and begins to scheme for the throne he knows he merits, was promised and has earned.”

“Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science - steam carriages, zeppelins, armoured trains - none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last century's attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission.”

“At the heart of banking is a suicidal strategy. Banks take money from the public or each other on call, skim it for their own reward and then lock the rest up in volatile, insecure and illiquid loans that at times they cannot redeem without public aid.”

“We generally write best of what we ourselves have seen.”

“To give money to a woman - and here I must speak as a man - is to deny her special quality, her irreplaceability, and reduce her unique amiability to a commodity. Money takes away her name, while transforming her lover into a nameless customer of a market of appetites.”

“Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion.”