PositiveThe Times (UK)This highly readable but thoroughly depressing book is an attempt to explain how Britain became the money-laundering capital of the world.
William Drozdiak
PositiveThe Times (UK)Macron is an internationalist who believes that European civilisation is at stake in a crumbling world order. This is a highly readable, balanced and insightful analysis of his mission to save it ... Drozdiak is too ready to lay the blame for the lack of progress on Macron’s European reform agenda on Angela Merkel’s excessive caution. The German chancellor is portrayed as a roadblock to reform. But it was not only the Germans who were exasperated by his grandiose plans, which took little account of economic and political realities, including the near impossibility of changing the EU treaties ... Nonetheless, acknowledging Macron’s failures should not blind one to his unusual strengths ... Drozdiak sees in the French president Europe’s last chance to avoid irrelevancy, or even worse, if the populists win and succeed in reversing European integration.
James Grant
PositiveThe Times (UK)As Grant concedes, Bagehot does not come across as particularly likeable, and in truth his life was not particularly eventful. There is a reason why they don’t build statues to financial journalists. But in Grant’s hands, Bagehot’s life and career provide a superb prism through which to observe the extraordinary revolution in the British economy during the 19th century ... Grant finds Bagehot to have been wrong on a lot of things: like much of the British establishment, he backed the slave-owning south in the American Civil War, he opposed extensions of the franchise to the working classes and was against votes for women. Even as a financial journalist, he was, says Grant, \'a middling seer\'. How Grant thinks this record justifies the book’s subtitle The Greatest Victorian, is baffling. That said, in the guild of financial journalists, the fact that his work is still being discussed 150 years later makes him the greatest of all time.
