He is the man who with one investment decision in 1992 -- to speculate against the survival of the pound in the European exchange rate mechanism -- - freed Britain from a straitjacket which had kept interest rates in double figures and the pound too high. In the eyes of many, he also sowed the financial seeds for the end of 18 years of Conservative rule.

He may be seen as a bogeyman in Malaysia, which blames him for meltdown in the Far East, but in London he is sought after for investment advice. This is partly due to his personality. Despite an image as an unashamed publicist and ruthless tycoon, he has a kindly, professorial air. The creases around his eyes add a warmth to his demeanour. He is the kind of tutor you wouldcomfortably go to for advice, without fear of putdown.

His Quantum Fund is regarded as emblematic of the fund management business for the super-rich. He is by background a central European, born to a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest in 1930, and has witnessed history first hand. He survived both Nazi and early Communist eras before arriving in London in 1947. At the London School of Economics, he first encountered Karl Popper, the philosopher and author of The Open Society And Its Enemies.

Popper's writings have strongly influenced Soros's thinking: his new book is rooted in Popper's ideas. The intellectual identity he has constructed for himself distances him from other big players in the global marketplace: he seems to operate on a more worthy plane, entitling him to have views on matters from drugs to the UN.

His capacity to disarm is useful. Take his encounter with the normally tough-minded Eurosceptic MP Teddy Taylor, before whom witnesses shuffle nervously. When Soros called at theTreasury select committee, Taylor purred at him: ``If I won the lottery, what should I do with the cash, invest in dollars, the euro or the yen?'' Without missing a beat, Soros playfully replied: ``I am afraid that is very expensive advice.''

The select committee might have given Soros an arduous time. After all, he has been at the epicentre of every crisis of the global economy in the 1990s, from the collapse and rebooting of the ERM in 1992 and 1993, to the start of the Asian crisis in 1997 in Thailand and the calamitous devaluation of the Russian rouble and debt moratorium this year, triggering the crisis about which he is now so vocal. But Soros was greeted deferentially. Members of the committee appeared more anxious to sound him out on the euro -- hoping that his ideas would match theirs.

The pound, Soros believes, is in for a hard time in Euroland after January 4. Because it juggles between the world of the dollar and that of the European currencies, it will be pulled in two directions. This is thekind of situation Soros relishes. His investment funds thrive on spotting weaknesses in national economies and then taking huge bets on them. This was lost on the MPs, who hung on every phrase.

Soros also returned to the LSE, where he was presented at his book launch as one of the world's great economic thinkers, a worthy successor to Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. Flanked by the LSE's director, Anthony Giddens, Soros was clearly enjoying the occasion. He modestly rejected claims on the flysheet of the book that he was a `financial genius' and stuck firmly to his thesis that the governance of the international economy was out of control.

This was partly because the countries at the centre -- the western economic powers had applied different solutions to those at the periphery, such as Korea, than to themselves. At times, Soros's age showed. Questions went unheard and the master's hand went to his ear as he struggled to decipher his interlocutors. But this may simply have been a craftytechnique designed to gather his thoughts and put the more difficult questioners on the back foot.

The Observer News Service