George Soros once said that it was a sort of disease to consider yourself ''some kind of god'', but he got over it after he actually became one.

His deity index is unlikely to be any more comprehensible than the stupefying amounts he heaps on the roulette wheel of international investments. He wrecks economies as though they were small-time competitors in a cruise ship casino. He is the man who broke the Bank of England in 1992, forcing Britain out of the European exchange rate mechanism, and netting himself an estimated $1bn in a single punt. He loses as much in other speculative forays without a flinch, and not quite as often.

Listed second only to Kirk Kerkorian (who buys and sells MGM for fun and profit) in last October's The Forbes 400, the Soros personal fortune was estimated at $3.5bn. Last year he was also listed first in Fortune Magazine's top 25 biggest givers in the United States. His handouts reached $350m for the year, to establish perhaps for every nine parts of a megalomaniac there is a tenth part investigating the tax deductible returns on philanthropy. His 22 national foundations in Central Europe have ploughed hundreds of millions he has

raided in gambles on foreign exchange markets of the West. He funds ''open societies''. He donates to charities.

At 68, he has always appeared to have an inspired sense of timing, that in another life could have made him a wonderful comedian or the perfect clown. As a Jewish child in Budapest, when the Germans searched the family home, he had taken a corner in the family attic.

After the war, Stalin moved in, Soros moved out to England. In 1956, the abortive Hungarian Rising, and Soros arrived on Wall Street. After this, commodities come easy. The impression is, if he threw himself out of a 30th floor window he would alight on a safely suspended girder, and the building would topple. Not surprisingly, now when he jumps, flocks of investors follow. Either he is blessed with sixth sense, or his information networks are formidable.

His background in Budapest was middle class. It was the father, a lawyer, who anticipated the Holocaust and had laid emergency plans to split the family and issue false passports. Young George Soros was passed off as the gentile godson of an official whose remit included confiscation of Jewish properties.

The experience evidently gave Soros a lasting ambivalence towards his Jewishness. It has been noted he rarely supports Jewish ventures, and his increasingly portentous utterances lay stress on the value of pluralistic societies.

What the business world likes to mock as his philosophising pretensions is the product of his student days at the LSE where he became enthralled by Karl Popper.

Soros, who entertained ambitions of becoming an academic in one of the philosophy departments of the English universities, and who wrote at least one work, was drawn eventually into the somewhat different financial world. This poses the interesting question of what might have become of Bertrand Russell or A J Ayer if they had ever got serious about making a buck.

Setting up his own fund in 1965 Soros named it Quantum, doubtless to echo Planck's theory of the emission and absorption of energy, not continuously but in finite steps. His quantum investment these days is $100m. He does not deal in smaller chips. ''When he thinks he's right, he'll bet the ranch,'' observed a former colleague. Nothing, apparently, is too big or too small to attract his interest.

Last month it was revealed that he had increased a hitherto undisclosed stake in the catalogue retailer Argos. The month before, he appeared to have bought Thailand, or at least taken substantial stakes in several of its major industries to prop up a battered stock market.

His largesse is rarely appreciated. In Serbia he was called another Pablo Escobar, the Colombian who used drugs proceeds to benefit the poor. The President of Croatia called him the linchpin of a global plot. In Romania and Slovakia he is a target of anti-semitic abuse. In Serbia he is a militarist who campaigned for Western bombs to save Bosnia. In Russia and Belarus, he has been denounced as a CIA agent, yet he once reputedly bailed out the Russian government to allow it to pay a week's wages to employees.

Not playing God perhaps, but one of his brokers.