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I once asked my boss if we shouldn’t be out helping the poor and the sick, rather than searching for the meaning of a dot inside a bug that was almost too small to see.

‘The poor and the sick will always be with us,’ he said, ‘but we will change the way people think about the world.’

He had a…

In this, I was fortunate. The disesteem of money, symbolized by inflation, existed alongside a new and exaggerated esteem for money. In Britain, Germany, the states of central Europe, Russia, Latin America–indeed, everywhere I went, but particularly in Britain–money was quickly displacing all other…

At about this time, a further change came over my life. The money from Jeddah began to breed, convulsively. While I slept, or was drunk, or made love, or smoked a Benson on the porch, my money worked and, as far as I could tell, for greater reward than I did. I felt a regret: the lightness which co…

AAs a child and teenager, I had little to do with money. I was educated on scholarships and state hand-outs and the kindness of strange adults, and this money passed over my head. I started thinking seriously about money only in 1978, in the city of Jeddah on the Red Sea.

I had come to Jeddah to…

There was, then, a near-priestly kind of romance in the idea that a high-purposed literary career would be profitless, at least in terms of cash. Here was the Thorny Way, the way of deprivation. And for a period, I went along with this, nose in the air. At the same time, though, I knew I could hand…