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What holds an Arab leader in power is a mixture of violence and prestige. Both President Assad and King Hussein were felt to have defended Arab interests against the world. That, in the end, is more important than what they wear on their head.

James Buchan

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James Buchan
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 11
Journalist
Novelist
James Ernest Buchan
Hon. James Ernest Buchan
Prestige
Ends
Wear
Mixture
Power
Kings
Important
Leader
Mixtures
World
Violence
Arab
Head
Hussein
Interest
Holds
Defended
President
Interests
Assad
Felt
King

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A century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity today it is almost as vital to human existence as water.
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Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop.
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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.
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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.
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Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Europe and North America, we are told, are less dependent on energy-intensive heavy industry than in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems we squeeze more GDP out of a barrel of oil than in those benighted days.
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The dividing line between wish and need was never clear.
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Liberty in Islam is the liberty to be a Muslim, democracy likewise, individualism likewise.
James Buchan
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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.
James Buchan
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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.
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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.
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Saudi Arabia is a puritanical state that claims a monopoly of wisdom and virtue.
James Buchan
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Life without oil, in fact, would be so different that it is frightening to contemplate. We are addicted, and it is no comfortable addiction.
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Saudi Arabia operates according to the belief that God made young men and women so utterly and completely without self-control that they must be physically segregated every moment of the day and night.
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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.
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My belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences.
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