‘Bill Gates is just a figurehead. I am actively engaged’

In the bookcase in George Soros’s South Kensington drawing-room, neatly lined up beside works on Kant, Adam Smith and Karl Popper, are multiple copies of Open Society, written by one of today’s aspiring philosophers: Soros himself. The literary line-up is testament to the Hungarian–American billionaire’s search for something that money can’t buy — acceptance at the same table as these great thinkers. But his cash has paid for a place on the same shelf, at least in his own home. And last week Soros was in London to talk about his latest book, The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror (Weidenfeld).

Despite giving away $5 billion of his personal fortune to propagate his beliefs, Soros will always be remembered for the $1 billion he made from the crisis in which sterling was forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. He became known as ‘the man who broke the Bank of England’ and the tag has overshadowed everything he has done since.