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

The prevailing ideology of the modern west – which is political economy – is in the doghouse. Having failed to notice atmospheric pollution, the economists then frightened themselves with the sort of financial crisis they said they had abolished.

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.

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.

Ever since the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, the Muslim world has been in slow decline relative to the west. With Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the creeping British annexation of Muslim India, that decline took on a malign aspect.

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.

The great disadvantage of getting older is to be obliged to relive the salient economic events of one's youth, with nothing learned and nothing forgotten.

Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.

Even before he came to power in 1997, Gordon Brown promised to change the accounts to parliament from simple litanies of cash in and cash out, to a more commercial system that took notice of the public property the departments were using. This system is known as resource accounting.

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