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. – James Buchan
If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside. – 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. – James Buchan
The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britains 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. – James Buchan