PanThe Wall Street JournalThe terminus toward which the sometimes tedious monetary and policy history in this book rumbles is the \'puzzle of what went wrong\' in the reaction to the Great Recession ... It is indeed the essential question. But Mr. Skidelsky claims on the basis of thin evidence all manner of terrible imperfections in the way a free economy works, while offering no quantitative evidence that governments are wise enough to fix the imperfection without adding worse ones ... The proposal is indeed socialism all the way down.
Niall Ferguson
RaveThe Wall Street JournalNiall Ferguson has again written a brilliant book, this time in defense of traditional top-down principles of governing the wild market and the wilder international order ... Not everyone will agree, but everyone will be charmed and educated ... We see this happening today, with social media and 24-hour news, fake and genuine. But, as Mr. Ferguson shows, it has happened many times before. His short chapters are lucid snapshots of a world history of Towers and Squares, filled with gracefully deployed learning ... The Square and the Tower is always readable, intelligent, original. You can swallow a chapter a night before sleep and your dreams will overflow with scenes of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Napoleon, Kissinger. In 400 pages you will have restocked your mind. Do it.
