Sometimes, when you eat chilli-hot food, the first few mouthfuls tell you nothing other than that the food contains chilli. It takes a moment or two to detect the presence of other flavours. Bank bail-outs and collapses are a bit like that. At first you think they’re all the same – that’s the chilli – then you notice that the spicing is in fact subtly different. RBS might be considered a complex dish like the Mexican mole, a chilli-and-chocolate stew with a huge variety of textures and flavours that leaves you uncertain what you’re eating. The failure of HBOS is more straightforward, more like a bog-standard high-street curry.
- John Lanchester, London Review of Books.
This is as good a piece of writing as anything that gets done.
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