PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Unlike Thatcher’s previous biographers, Moore has the chance to judge her against the troubled, unsustainable world she helped create ... Moore conveys brilliantly the sense of the walls closing in: first slowly and erratically, with regular apparent reprieves for Thatcher, and then very fast ... having highlighted her fogeyishness, Moore – perhaps because he is a bit of a fogey himself – does not explore its implications. For all the awesome scale and thoroughness of his trilogy, over 20 years in the researching and writing, the shifting social texture of Britain under Thatcher is largely missing. Without it, the books fall short of being definitive ... Thatcherism, the book implies, remains as full of potential as ever. Moore criticises her governing tone as insensitive and divisive, but not the substance of what her governments did. A comparison of the Britain she promised and the country we have actually lived in since is not something this book dares to offer.
Aaron Bastani
MixedThe Guardian...[a] short, dizzingly confident book ... In the doomy world of 2019, to come across this forecast is quite a shock. Enormous optimism about humanity’s long-term future; faith in technology, and in our wise use of it; a guilt-free enthusiasm for material goods; and yet also a belief that an updated form of communism should be 21st-century society’s organising principle—these are Bastani’s main themes. The immediate temptation is to see the book as some sort of joke: a satire, or a political prank ... Fully Automated Luxury Communism is a typical Bastani catchphrase—attention-grabbing, armored against attack with a sparkly coating of irony—and he has been deploying it shamelessly for years in the lead-up to this publication ... Like many futurologists, he bases his predictions on a broad-brush reading of history ... But Bastani writes with pace, economy and infectious enthusiasm, and he solidifies his most speculative chapters, to an extent, with some telling facts ... Bastani’s vast proposals sometimes lack the relatively human scale and rootedness in history of the schemes, similar in optimism and intent, currently being promoted by other leftists as a Green New Deal. Yet sometimes the nimbler Bastani persona lightens these pages ... Some readers will finish this book exhilarated and energized. Others will be unconvinced, or utterly baffled. There are more ideas crammed in here than in a whole shelf of standard politics books. And in today’s fraught world, the time to read whole shelves of politics books may have passed.
Oliver Bullough
PositiveThe GuardianBullough approaches his forbidding task by coming up with clear, snappy metaphors for the offshore world and how it works. He explains them, and then deploys them again and again, like catchphrases or portentous images in a novel ... Bullough’s concise, confident book is full of...jaw-dropping examples. It also covers a lot of historical ground ... Some of this narrative is a bit too neat. The political forces for and against offshore capitalism, and how they ebbed and flowed during the 20th century are scarcely mentioned. Instead, as if narrating a documentary, Bullough sometimes searches too self-consciously for colorful characters and locations. But more often his busy and determined reporting from the Caribbean, eastern and western Europe and the U.S.—south-east Asia and the Middle East feature perhaps less than they should—produces memorable and telling scenes ... He is surprisingly successful at getting some of the architects of the offshore world to open up ... Bullough’s book is pacy, clever and far more entertaining than you’d expect of a work on this subject. Sometimes it moves so fast you suspect that nervous lawyers have been involved. At other times, you wish he’d written about the offshore manoeuvrings of tax-averse mainstream corporations as well. But if you still have any illusions about the wonders of liberated capitalism, Moneyland will probably cure you.
Linsey McGoey
PositiveThe Guardian\"These are all strong and rarely made arguments. But they feel a bit unforgiving...This is a clear-eyed and much-needed study regardless.\
Charles Moore
MixedThe GuardianMoore’s writing is mostly restrained and cool, a nice corrective to Thatcher’s overheated personality. But when he allows himself to be more subjective, his language can be a touch Tory-triumphalist.
