Quotes from Barry Maitland

That's genius, you see. The masterstroke that no one recognises until it's been pulled off.

you know how our high street banks got started? From the fortunes Mr Lloyd and Mr Barclay made from making Jamaica into a concentration camp for slaves to grow sugar. Then the world sugar price collapsed and we gave them independence and pissed off. Like walking out on this totally traumatised family you've been bashing up for several hundred years.

You're a liberal, right? You adore positive logic, and you have a certain political awareness, which maybe is the conscience of the privileged.

I was able to convince them that the Starling case is not, essentially, about extortion, kidnapping, decapitation or murder. It is about postage stamps.' 'Postage stamps?' 'More particularly about the forgery of rare postage stamps, which is fraud, our bailiwick.

The fifth principle [of Arne Naess's principles of deep ecology] states that the flourishing of both human and non-human life requires a substantial decrease of human population. As I said, we are a plague, and our population is out of control. And we don't want to die.

It's turning a warrior race, the hammer of the Scots, the butchers of the Welsh and Irish, the ravagers of half the globe, into a docile herd of consumers who care for nothing but woolly jumpers and soft music