3 December 2020 James Buchan Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.
3 December 2020 James Buchan 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.
3 December 2020 James Buchan Bulls don’t read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.
3 December 2020 James Buchan 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.
3 December 2020 James Buchan The truth is, of course, that history is not completed in modern commerce any more than philosophy is perfected in political economy. In other words, there is nothing timeless or God-given about filling stations and penicillin and plastic bags.
3 December 2020 James Buchan Since the attack on the United States on September 11 2001, and the US retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, there must be few people who have not felt a twinge of nostalgia for the cold war.
3 December 2020 James Buchan 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.
3 December 2020 James Buchan Any new financial order for the world must tackle the three chief challenges of our age.
3 December 2020 James Buchan The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britain’s belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago.
3 December 2020 James Buchan Rarely in modern times has there been such a revolution in commercial sentiment as occurred in 2008, or such a display in government and business of panic and helplessness.
3 December 2020 James Buchan Whatever else it was, Adolf Hitler’s short-lived regime was also a colossal industrial process by which the wealth and productive power of much of Europe was wrenched from its normal purposes and converted into a machine for killing.
3 December 2020 James Buchan Saudi Arabia is a puritanical state that claims a monopoly of wisdom and virtue.
3 December 2020 James Buchan Profits in business always depend on the rate of interest: the higher the interest, the higher the rate of profit required.
3 December 2020 James Buchan 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.
3 December 2020 James Buchan The world dominion of western thought, forms of organisation, technology and military force is not God-given, nor eternal, nor greatly appreciated by the rest of the world.
3 December 2020 James Buchan If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.
3 December 2020 James Buchan Were there peace and justice in the Middle East, the Arabs would no more need their tinhorn dictators than they would their corpulent princes.
3 December 2020 James Buchan Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka.
3 December 2020 James Buchan In modern society, where most people live in cities, and where both needs and wishes are absolved through the same remote agency – money – the distinction between wishes and needs has altogether vanished.
3 December 2020 James Buchan 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.
3 December 2020 James Buchan To make a love story, you need a couple of young people, but to reflect on the nature of love, you’re better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature – and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century.
