The Honourable James Buchan (born 11 June 1954) is a Scottish novelist and historian. Read full biography of James Buchan →
We generally write best of what we ourselves have seen.
In falling markets, there is nothing that has not happened before. The bear or pessimist sees only the past, which imprisons the wretched financial... →
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... →
Losing your capital is like losing your trousers. It is a real humiliation, and one not to be soon repeated.
The dividing line between wish and need was never clear.
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... →
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... →
When Gordon the Brown, in London in 1997, commissioned a great inquisition or survey of his new realm, the result was the so-called national asset... →
Where consumption is both conspicuous and competitive, humanity will never run out of new wishes. All the while, industry creates new desires that... →
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... →
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... →
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... →
If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.
The Honourable James Buchan (born 11 June 1954) is a Scottish novelist and historian.