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 delay my induction into the money society at home, to postpone the passage into adulthood.

I had got a job working at a newspaper I’ll call the Saudi News. It was in a plywood building at the end of the airport runway. The newspaper, the building and the airport have all since vanished, for they were embarrassing physical reminders of an earlier age in Saudi history, the years before 1973, before money. The quadruple rise in the price of crude oil at the end of that year had detonated the world’s trading system, and money was streaming into Saudi Arabia as nowhere and never before, trailing its usual baggage of power and influence. The burden of history had passed to a few pale, fat men gliding like phantoms at noon into their Lincolns. The Muslim civilizations of Egypt and India, with their ancient architecture and worldly cultures, had become worthless; Europeans and Americans waited for days in the ante-rooms of dozing assistant deputy under-secretaries of state; the British, who had once set up and knocked down these princelings, wheedled and bribed with the best of them.