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

The world survived the fall of the Roman empire and will no doubt outlast our own so much more splendid civilisation.

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.

Economists, like royal children, are not punished for their errors.

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.

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

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.