Defying Hitler: A Memoir tells the tale of one man’s struggle against the surging tide of savage nationalism in 1930s Germany. “This is the story of a duel,” the book starts. “It is a duel between two very unequal adversaries: an exceedingly powerful, formidable and ruthless state and an insignificant, unknown individual.” The author’s real name was Raimund Pretzel, but he adopted the pseudonym Sebastian Haffner when he left Germany for Britain, in 1938, where he went on to become a respected journalist. This work charts what he describes as his efforts to preserve “his integrity, his private life and his personal honour”.

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Such is the potency of the book, that when I mentioned it to the musician Brian Eno recently, he told me he was buying copies for all his friends. “This book has had a bigger impact on me than almost anything else I have ever read because it showed how easy the slide into totalitarianism can be,” he later texted me. The Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman remembered earlier this year how a Tory MP had praised the book to him when they met. “It struck me as significant that we had both been reading about the 1930s to try and make sense of 2019,” wrote Rachman.

The reason is simple. Defying Hitler details with impressive honesty how a civilised nation ended up backing the most barbaric modern regime in Europe. We all know, of course, the outcome of those disturbing events in Germany. And yes, it would be foolish to argue that today’s surge of populism in Western democracies bears direct comparison with the rise of Nazi fascism that led to industrialised death camps. Yet ours is again a time of turmoil and bewildering uncertainty, as despairing citizens turn against democracy, politics shifts to extremes, demagogues patrol the political stages, nationalism rises once more and fake news corrodes free societies. It leaves many people fearful for the future, many public figures unsure how to react.

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As Haffner writes, the first country occupied by the Nazis “was not Austria or Czechoslovakia” but Germany — and his book helps explain how his nation hurtled into the abyss. It begins with a seven-year-old boy in 1914, unhappy at seeing his summer holiday curtailed by outbreak of war; but who then follows the campaign like a sport, with its statistics on ships sunk, prisoners seized and miles advanced.

Four years later, like Corporal Adolf Hitler, he was left distraught by defeat, feeling an unsettling sense of loss. Then come the Weimar Republic years of economic chaos, hyper-inflation and political violence as the Nazi shadow grows. Moderates were left politically homeless in a fight for supremacy between far-Left and far-Right.

It is revealing to see how rapidly the Nazis went from being figures of fun to running the country. After the election of September 1930, “a ridiculous splinter party became the second largest faction” in parliament. But Hitler was still seen as a joke, a repulsive character delighting in incendiary threats — although Haffner notes “the strange befuddlement and numbness of his opponents”. In January 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, “the general opinion was that it was not the Nazis who had won but the bourgeois parties of the Right who had ‘captured’ the Nazis and held all the key positions”. People believed the system would constrain their excesses.

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The power of this work, however, comes not from telling a familiar historical story, but from the author’s personal vignettes as “a typical example of the German educated bourgeois” living “against an arrestingly dramatic backdrop”. His father, a dignified civil servant, suffers with economic struggles. Haffner attends a louche ball which is broken up by snarling police. He hides in doorways to avoid having to salute Nazi parades. In one scene, he is kissing and caressing a Jewish girlfriend in the Grunewald woods, when a group of teenagers passes by and “cheerfully” tells them to perish. A friend’s partner, a Left-wing doctor, disappears. People accept their telephones should be tapped and letters read amid scaremongering about enemies of the state. Judges become “people’s judges” with powers to ignore law, but are subject to instant dismissal.

Some join the Nazis through fear, others jump on the bandwagon or are “intoxicated” by the idea of unity. Haffner works as a legal clerk. Half his small group of friends studying for final exams become Nazis, with one threatening to shop him to the Gestapo after a row; the others go into exile. A Jewish judge presides over his court, but colleagues start to treat him “with a certain tasteful delicacy, like one does suffering from a serious disease”.

As he works in the library, brownshirts burst in, beat up a Jewish barrister and order out “non-Ayrans”. One thug comes up to Haffner and asks if he is Ayran. He replies yes instantly, blushing as he realises he has capitulated to their bigotry. “A moment too late I felt the shame, the defeat,” he writes poingnantly. “I had failed my very first test. I could have slapped myself.”

Later, in 1933, he must attend a Nazi indoctrination camp to continue his fledgling legal career, where they march, sing songs and wear Swastika armbands. As he plays chess under a giant portrait of Hitler, the radio announces the Reichstag has been dissolved and only one party will contest an election. “This still astonished me, in spite of all I had experienced. I was happy that now the Nazis had obviously gone too far.” Instead the evening ends with a massed chorus of the national anthem, right arms outstretched for three minutes. “We all sang or pretended to do so, each one of us the Gestapo of the others.”

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Such candour gives this book its immense punch. The author, like so many other Germans, lacked the courage of resistance when confronted by swaggering hate. He assumed the norms of civilisation would expose the absurdities of the Nazis, then constrain the excesses of extremists who openly targeted their fellow citizens. Instead, space for dissent was throttled as democracy evolved into dictatorship. Decent people clung on to their careers and their families, retreating in the face of horror or oblivious to the suffering of others. As you turn the pages, they beg a difficult question: how would you respond in such a situation?

On one level, this fine book is a fierce warning about the dangers of nationalism — what Haffner called the “deadliest enemy” to his country,  and something which is seeping back across our continent. He calls this poisonous creed “a dangerous mental illness wherever it appears, capable of distorting the character of a nation and making it ugly, just as vanity and egoism distort the character of a person”. He concludes that any German placing value in humanity and openness had no option but to leave the country they loved. “One came to feel that any foreign country would seem more like home than Adolf Hitler’s ‘Reich’.”

Haffner’s book takes us into the heart of emerging horror and exposes why so many decent people averted their gaze from evil, leading to the destruction of German democracy followed by genocide and war. It offers the reader a real-time sense of witnessing the rise of the Nazis. He wonders at each step into darkness about the reality of the dangers, the best response to their threat and the strength of his state. His story seems so remote, so unreal, so removed from our own lives. Yet echoes from this era can be heard in these uncertain times.

The poor woman was soon dead, but P. T. Barnum was on the way to fame and fortune. The man we associate with the circus was much more than an entertainer; he was a principal actor in the construction of an all-American tradition: the blurring of truth with fiction.

America is the home of magnificent human achievement. I used to complain to the BBC that our coverage of it contained little besides stereotypical stuff about guns and poverty: why, if the place was as ghastly as we portrayed, was it so successful? So rich? Why did half the world want to live there? Why San Francisco, rather than Irkutsk?

Go and tell us, the BBC said, and for many years, as North America Editor, I did. But a decade later, with the benefit of distance and hindsight, I realise that the real story of America cannot be told by separating out the rational positive stuff from the dross. It’s all one, folks. It’s a show. The greatest show on Earth in some respects but in others the most dangerous, the most distressingly foolish. A show that entertains us, hypnotises us, and might eventually destroy us all.

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One book above all others knits together the strands of American thinking — and lack of thinking — that combine to bring us this uniquely peculiar brew of madness and sanity, kindness and cruelty, civilisation and dystopia. Fantasyland, by Kurt Andersen, was a rip-roaring success among the NPR-listening New York Times-reading metrosexual elites, when it was published in 2017. As one reviewer observed, “The people who should read this book won’t — because it’s a book — but reality based citizens will get a kick out of this winning romp through centuries of American delusion.”

That’s the point, and the joy of Fantasyland. In a literary world weighed down by formulaic, squealing Trump-phobia, this is a work of history that tells us why Trump is where he is and why this is an entirely predictable consequence of how America is. There is nothing new about the Donald. Nothing unique. Nothing, even, that is outside the normal. This is the conclusion, baleful as it is, of Fantasyland.

P.T. Barnum was, as Andersen tells it, “America’s first great commercial blurrer of truth and make-believe.” Soon to be followed by another. William F Cody — stage name: Buffalo Bill — really did kill “Indians” in battle. But he also played the part of himself in a stage entertainment. And then — this is really crucial and wholly American — he went back to killing Indians, but did it while wearing the kit of his stage character. And then he went back to the theatre alongside Indians he recruited to play the part of themselves.

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Andersen calls the Buffalo Bill phenomenon, “a key milestone in our national evolution”.  He suggests that no other nation has even attempted the blurring of reality and fantasy in its public life that America has achieved.

Is he right? Plainly there have been moments — long moments — of national hysteria or myopia in other nations at various stages of their development. But Andersen suggests that America is special. No other nation has combined fake news with real news and cared less about the difference. The point is simple but often missed: America’s rational brain and irrational heart are not in conflict. They are essential organs in a deeply strange body. Lose one and the whole enterprise falls apart.

That does not, of course, mean that this jolly jape can carry on forever. The darkness of America — its ability to go off the deep end, to believe things that are not true and to disbelieve things that are — feels, long term, like an existential threat.

The shiny positivity can sometimes blind us to the madness that lurks beneath. Nowhere is this contrast more evident than in the social media revolution that began on America’s West Coast. We are slowly waking up to the downside of tech and the contempt that its overlords have for freedoms expressed through democratic government. But when people complain about the power and the irresponsibility of the tech world, they should remember that this world grew out of a 60s hippy culture that valued personal experience above all else. It prized the right to believe absolutely anything — to mix up fiction and reality at will — as Americans always had. Not to be governed. To do your own thing.

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UFO hunters. Anti-vaxxers. 9/11 truthers. They didn’t come into being with the tech revolution: their worldview is part and parcel of the West Coast motto, ‘do what feels right and seems true to you and hang the consequences’. But they are also part of the wider American tradition for mixing fact and fiction, and respecting non-facts as well as truths. Andersen suggests it comes all the way from the Puritans who brought with them to the New World all the dotiness of a group of people who were already — by definition and self-selection — in a mental world of their own before they set sail.

Of course, America is not alone in facing the challenges of fakery. But there is something unique about the American predilection for that Buffalo Bill style blurring of the differences between truth and fiction. As Andersen puts it: “Mix the protestant impulse to find meaning and purpose in everything, with the Enlightenment’s empiricism and you get our American mania for ‘connecting all the dots’, irrationality in rationalist drag.”

Irrationality in rationalist drag. That’s it. That’s America. Dotty religion, pseudoscience, tatty fakery — all living alongside, or mixed up within, a nation that thinks its business is business, thinks it is serious and sober and searching for truth.

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Will they ever snap out of it? Will the fever pass? Probably not. And frankly it looks as if it could get a lot worse before it gets better in the era of Trump. America is on a bender, a Buffalo Bill re-enactment moment. Andersen points out a striking fact towards the end of Fantasyland: in 2008, three quarters of the Republican candidates for president said they believed in evolution. By 2012, the figure had dropped to a third. In 2016 it was down to one candidate: Jeb Bush, who said it was his truth, but did not need to be taught in schools.

You could cry at such nonsense. Or shrug your shoulders and turn away. Or keep loving America — enjoy the circus — and hope for the best. As the father of an American citizen and a frequent visitor to the land of the too-free-with-the-facts, I am taking the latter option. But I admit to being worried. Andersen, being American, ends his book with a little homily about how decent folks can rescue the situation. It is the least convincing part. I am not so sure they can.

What these dissatisfactions share is a sense of being trapped in an economic logic whose priorities no longer benefit society as a whole, but that — we are told — cannot be challenged without making things even worse. The foundational premise of that system is continual growth, as measured by GDP (gross domestic product) per capita. Economies must grow; if they do not, then recession sinks jobs, lives, entire industries. Tax receipts fall, welfare systems fail, everything staggers.

But what happens when growth harms societies? And what happens when growth comes at the cost of irreparable harm to the environment?

As Sir David Attenborough put it in 2013, “We have a finite environment – the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.”

This is the argument of Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth. The challenge the book sets out is at once simple and staggering. In a finite world, with limited natural resources, how do we deliver prosperity into the future for a human population that keeps on growing?

Jackson, who today is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey, and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), argues that we need to start by scrapping GDP as the core metric of prosperity. As the book puts it: “Rising prosperity isn’t self-evidently the same thing as economic growth.”

Growth is not distributed equally, and inequality is widening. At the time of the book’s first publication this was already true; after some ten years of quantitative easing in an attempt by governments to stimulate economies, the situation is even worse. But governments had to print money, because if they did not growth would falter.

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The pursuit of growth is also undermining social bonds and overall wellbeing. In 2018, a commission reported on the ‘loneliness epidemic’ that is blighting lives and worsening health across the UK, driven in part by greater mobility of individuals away from family connections. (Mobility of labour, of course, is essential to drive economic growth.)

This year, even The Economist acknowledged that rising growth does not guarantee rising happiness.

If that were not enough, the resources available to supply continued growth are dwindling: “If the whole world consumed resources at only half the rate the US does […] copper, tin, silver, chromium, zinc and a number of other ‘strategic minerals’ would be depleted in less than four decades.” (Prosperity Without Growth)

Rare earth minerals, essential for technologies from circuit boards to missile guidance systems, are projected to be exhausted in less than two decades. 

And this is before we get to the contested questions of “peak oil”, and climate change, and how far and fast we need to decarbonise — a topic on which even The Economist expressed concern in December this year.

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Inasmuch as the public debate considers these nested dilemmas, the vague sentiment is that technology will save us. The jargon term for this is ‘decoupling’ — that is, the ability of the economy to grow without using more resources, by becoming more efficient. But will decoupling happen?

The theoretical core of Jackson’s book is a detailed unpacking of models that suggest it will not, or that if absolute decoupling is possible it will happen so far into the future we will already have wrecked the climate and run out of everything. Rather than rely on this fantasy, Jackson argues, we must challenge the dependence on growth.

But how? The global economic system depends on growth and in times of recession it is the poorest who suffer first. It is a policy double bind: on the one hand, we must think of the environment, so governments encourage us to buy less, consume less, recycle more and so on. But on the other, they must deliver a growing economy, which mean encouraging us to buy more, consume more, keep the economy going. Electorates are, understandably, cynical about the sincerity of this flatly self-contradictory position.

What, then, is the alternative? Jackson is an economist, not a revolutionary firebrand, and his book does not call on us to bring down capitalism. In the second part of Prosperity Without Growth, he instead suggests some quietly radical approaches to bringing the global economy back into the service of human flourishing.

He advocates government intervention to drive much of the change he proposes, including encouraging economies to pivot away from manufacturing, finance and the pursuit of novelty at all costs toward less obviously productive but more human services such as slow food cooperatives, repair and maintenance or leisure services.

He also advocates heavy state support for ecologically-oriented investment. When I contacted him to ask about his book ten years on he spoke positively of the contribution that a “Green New Deal” could make on this front: “It shows a commitment to social and environmental investment that is absolutely essential to achieve a net zero carbon world”, he told me. “Simply put, we just can’t achieve that without this scale of investment, and that form of commitment from Government.”

He also told me he is often criticised for being “too interventionist in relation to the state”, as he puts it. But perhaps (though Jackson does not use the term himself) he might be more fairly described as post-liberal. Prosperity Without Growth is a quiet but excoriating critique of the growing human and ecological costs of liberal economics.

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Intriguingly, within Jackson’s proposals lurks another challenge to liberalism, that to date has not been greatly associated with the left: the critique of radical liberal individualism as a social doctrine. Along with state intervention to tweak the economy and drive ecological investment, Jackson argues that governments should promote “commitment devices”: that is, “social norms and structures that downplay instant gratification and individual desire and promote long-term thinking”.

Examples of ‘commitment devices’ include savings accounts and the institution of marriage. Governments should implement policies that clearly incentivise commitment devices, for doing so will promote social flourishing and resilience even as such institutions offer alternative forms of meaning-making to the pursuit of shopping-as-identity-formation.

Thus, we cannot save the earth without reviving some social values and structures today thought of as small ‘c’ conservative: stable marriage, savings, settled and cohesive communities with lower levels of labour mobility.

I asked Jackson whether some of the more vociferous socially liberal proponents of environmental change had cottoned on to these potentially quite conservative implications of his theories. He told me “This is an interesting question, for sure, and one that I don’t think has really been picked up – even by me!” (Except at UnHerd – see here and here for example.) But, he says, it is incumbent on us to set aside political tribalism in the search for solutions to our current dilemmas.

“I believe there are elements of a Burkean conservatism which are profoundly relevant to a politics of the environment, even as I am convinced that the progressive instincts of the left are essential in our response to social and environmental inequality. I see it as incumbent on those working for change both to understand the underlying motivations of different political positions and also to adopt a pragmatic politic in which solutions are suited to the challenges of today rather than the dogma of yesterday.”

Indeed.

But the apocalyptic vibe in Texas, home to both David Koresh and a very big plant for assembling nuclear weapons, felt like a more condensed version of a zeitgeist that was abroad in the culture more generally. Anxieties about jihadi terror, global warming and the decline of the West were widespread, and zombie plague movies were just starting to take off. Society, it seemed, was in a state of apocalyptic arousal, and I detected a weird undercurrent of yearning, as if some people liked it. But why?

I started taking the bus to the Austin public library to read whatever they had about the end of the world. This being Texas, they had rather a lot, and I have fond memories of sitting among the homeless people and the hippy burnouts, leafing through the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements, absorbing endless factoids about strange religious movements, cults and prophets.

The theme would follow me home; on the way back to the bus I would always pick up a free street newspaper that informed me that the Maitreya, a messianic figure from Buddhism, was already among us. (He still is, apparently, although his prophet has since died, alas.)

I soon realised why some people seemed to crave the end of the world; they want this terrible world of suffering to pass away and be replaced by a new world (and some people really want to see the wicked punished). I also discovered that belief in an earthly heaven on earth — Millennialism — had inspired some extraordinary behaviour over the centuries. Why had nobody ever taught me about the naked Adamites of Bohemia, or Sabattai Zevi, the mysterious messiah who aroused the hopes of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire only to convert to Islam, or the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the enormous devastation it wrought in the dying days of the Qing dynasty.

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Come to think of it, why was it not better known that Isaac Newton and James Napier were profoundly apocalyptic thinkers? The neat line between their scientific-mathematical studies and their religious obsessions was an anachronism imposed by revisionist historians. Then there were the obvious millennial aspects to the French Revolution, and communism, as well as Nazism; throw in the messianic-apocalyptic aspects of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam and it seemed as though maybe this whole end of the world thing was one of the most important ideas going…

It was as if I had discovered an alternate history of humanity, where the dream of a happy apocalypse had inspired prophets, saints, scientists, madmen and martyrs to repeatedly attempt to birth new, better worlds out of the flawed ones they lived in. I liked how strange, and wild it was, and how ambiguous it was in its legacy. There was a whiff of the disrespectable about it, which appealed to me; but that in turn meant that many “serious” writers ignored the theme, or quarantined it in the “mad cult” category.

Maybe digging into this stuff wasn’t good for your academic career. And as for those who did write about it, well they talked about Protestant Europe and the USA a lot. Even Russia, with profoundly deep millennial tradition, barely got a look in. Clearly somebody needed to write a book that would tie all these strange events and threads together, clearly articulating why the End was so important, and why.

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Then, in 2011, that book appeared: Heaven and Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, written by Richard Landes, the editor of Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements. Landes is a mediaevalist and he could easily have turned out a book focusing on the likes of Joachim of Fiore and Rodulfus Glaber but instead he took inspiration from Georges Perec’s novel A Void which omits the letter “e” entirely, and wrote a book about the millennialism that didn’t include Jewish or Christian case studies. This radical exclusion enabled him to more clearly highlight just how much the phenomenon cuts across time, space and culture.

Thus Landes highlights the tale of Nongqawuse the Xhosa prophetess in southern Africa, who told her followers to slaughter their cattle that the dead might arise and drive out the British; the Taiping Heavenly kingdom, cargo cults, the French and Russian Revolutions, UFO cults and the Pharaoh Akhenaten.

We see millenniums pursued from the top down as well as from the bottom up, and Landes explores how an accelerated sense of “apocalyptic time” acts upon those who welcome the advent of an earthly paradise and those who resist it. We read of great and terrible deeds, and of course, the repeated experience of failure, disappointment and what follows it.

After reading the book, I was left with an unshakeable sense that apocalyptic and millennial undercurrents are always running through our societies, but that it is practically impossible to tell when they will erupt to the surface. Yet when they do, hitherto rejected and bizarre ideas can move to the centre rapidly, turning everything upside down. Thus Heaven and Earth powerfully underscores the importance of ancient dreams, phantoms and prophecies as motivating factors in human affairs.

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That, no doubt, is why Landes wrote a very long introduction in which he defended himself against anticipated criticisms from his academic peers. Having taken such a bold stance, he clearly expected strong pushback. Instead the book shared the same fate as so many others: it entered the world, got some reviews, but not too many, and that was that. Not many people were outraged; not many people were paying attention. If they did pay too much attention they would see how deep these currents run even in themselves, and that might prove a difficult pill to swallow.

But Landes’s book does deserve a wider audience, and to be read, and debated. He provides powerful tools for thinking about the allure of the apocalypse and the millennium, and enables us to detect patterns, categorise types and recognise symptoms. I don’t think that the world has become less apocalyptic since I started getting into the end back in 2006; with the sudden rise of Extinction Rebellion we see a movement that is living in accelerated apocalyptic time, albeit without much hope of anything nice happening on the other end, unless you like wearing hair shirts.

But who knows how it will mutate, or what other ideas will emerge to surprise, disappoint or perhaps transform us. From reading Heaven on Earth it is clear that such ideas will emerge, though — as example after example in the book proves — we should hope it doesn’t happen in our lifetimes.

In 2011, a junior Conservative MP published a pamphlet, The Case for Real Capitalism, which anatomised the failures that led to the global financial crisis and — by implication — the policy responses that followed. Jesse Norman had been elected for the first time the previous year, and no one took much notice of his work; but looking back, he may well be considered a prophet whose foresight ought to have been perceived by his own party.

If it had been, UK economic policy might have been more sustainable, British business and regulation more sensible, and society happier. Oh, and the Conservatives might not have taken the better part of a decade to wake up to some of the realities of markets, economics and politics that the new Boris Johnson government is starting to recognise.

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But back then, the Conservatives didn’t even have a majority — let alone a decisive one. Those were the days of the coalition, which saw regular disagreement between its Conservative and Lib Dem partners, not least about markets and their role. Vince Cable, the Lib Dem business secretary, was a bete noir for many Conservatives, because he articulated a sharp critique of capitalism. In the autumn of 2010, he enraged many “free market” Conservatives when he declared: “Capitalism takes no prisoners and kills competition where it can.”

Facing the coalition across the Commons was Ed Miliband. It’s strange to think now, in these post-Corbyn days, but Miliband was then regarded as a leftist intent on a radical break with economic consensus. Early in his leadership he said businesses could be divided into “predators” and “producers”, an analysis that again drew intense criticism from some Conservatives.

Yet in The Case for Real Capitalism, here was a Conservative author offering an assessment of the UK economic model that shared an awful lot with that of politicians his party scorned.

There were, and are, significant differences, of course. Whereas many on the Left regard an open market economy as inevitably unfair and unbalanced, Norman’s view was that capitalism in its pure form can deliver precisely the same harmony and balance that the Left associates with direct action and provision from the State.

“Capitalism relies on, and so demands, trust. It does not exist to make the rich rich,” Norman wrote, explaining how many Western versions of capitalism had gone badly astray, bereft of moral purpose, short on competition and heavy on rent-seeking incumbents. This, he said, was not real capitalism but “crony capitalism”: “Crony capitalism has two key features: business activity loses any relation to, and often clashes with, the wider public interest; and business merit is separated from business reward..”

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To read Norman’s words today, is to be struck by how familiar his criticisms and themes are. Eight years before the US Business Roundtable confirmed that even the almighty American CEO class sees capitalism in its current form as fraying its own “social licence”, Norman was itemising the “crisis of capitalism”.

A former BZW banker who later specialised in corporate governance, Norman wrote about the history of the public limited company.This is one of those subjects that appears arcane — and therefore only of interest to nerds like me — but it really is fundamental to any debate about capitalism, since it goes to the very basic question of what business is for.

As Norman remembered, the right to “incorporate” as a limited company — where the financial liabilities of owners are capped — was originally a privilege granted by Parliament, one which carried responsibilities and obligations: “Incorporation was a privilege that conferred economic benefits, and the purpose of the charter was to ensure that these benefits were in the sovereign’s, and later in the public, interest.”

Today’s companies are struggling to demonstrate “purpose” and explain how they are motivated by something wider and deeper than simply making money for their owners. In 2011, Norman was remembering a history that many are just learning now.

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In a similar vein, he locates executive pay in a social context: it’s not just about “what the market will bear” and it’s not a private matter between executives and owners. There is, if you’ll pardon the reference, a social aspect to the market for executives: “Pay is a litmus test of social norms, and excessive pay — the separation of business merit from business reward — is a hallmark of crony capitalism.”

Possibly Norman’s most prescient — and complex — observation was about the interaction between ideas of competition and community. Years before Amazon and Sports Direct stood accused of sucking the life out of provincial towns in order to cut the prices paid by consumers in richer places elsewhere, here was a Tory MP talking about community and culture being more important than aggregate national wealth:

“The official view of competition is a neoliberal one based on price competition and the possibility of market failure, conceived nationally. Among other things, this means that other social goals, and regional or local priorities, tend to be disregarded. Local democracy, and a community’s ability to shape its own culture, are relegated to the sidelines. Local shops are undermined by the big supermarkets, which have low prices at the till but impose significant external costs on the communities around them…. if culture matters, then local shops and services matter.”

Norman was a philosopher before ending up in the City, and his paper also reaches into the intellectual underpinnings of Conservatism. Correctly recalling that Margaret Thatcher was not the narrow neoliberal some now imagine her to have been, he points to a long tradition of Conservatives criticising unbridled markets and corporate excess — from Salisbury and Bonar Law to Macmillan’s The Middle Way.

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As the Johnson government explores a new variant of Conservatism that it hopes will retain the support of “new blue” voters — whose recent experience of British capitalism has not always been positive — many Conservatives will find themselves brushing up on, or just reading for the first time, such history.

As a non-partisan centrist and advocate of a rather different approach, I’ve been enjoying the recent spectacle of Tory free-marketeers rapidly trying to re-cast their belief in a small state and non-intervention as an abiding passion for higher public spending and ambitious industrial strategy. Welcome to the social market economy, chaps.

But if those chaps had listened a bit more to one of their own some years ago, they wouldn’t need to be undertaking such rapid political contortions today. The logic of Jesse Norman’s overall analysis of where Britain’s political economy stood at the start of the decade would have allowed the Conservatives to take a much shorter path to understanding the political economy — which many have only managed to do in the last few days.

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By Jesse Norman

“We are well into the NASTY decade: Noxious Austerity Stretching Ten Years. It may not prove to be that long. But however long it is, the policy response to the UK’s current economic malaise cannot simply consist of measures to restore growth and battle deflation. Rather, the goal should be to wake up and smell the coffee: to address the economic realities of the 21st century by changing some of the key features of our market economy and, especially, our culture over time. We need, then, to do two things: to make the moral case for real capitalism, and take resolute and sustained action against crony capitalism.”

The need for a moral capitalism. Purpose-led business. Excoriation of “noxious” austerity. A focus on local economies and interests. All of these ideas are commonplace today; they are, if I can presume to say so, among the foundation stones on which UnHerd itself is built. But remember, The Case for Real Capitalism was published in 2011, when Jeremy Corbyn was an eccentric backbencher, place-blind technocrats dominated economic policy, and the word Brexit had not been coined.

Nevertheless, what makes Norman’s pamphlet so interesting and important is not its prescience; he was not, after all, the only person in British politics outlining such a critique of capitalism. What matters is that he was a Conservative making that critique — and more significant, still, is how his party responded to that critique. Norman was not penalised for his thinking, but nor was he properly rewarded with real influence. He eventually became a junior minister, and is now in the Treasury, still outside the Cabinet.

His work from 2011 should be recognised as significant, not because of the influence it had, then, but because of the influence it didn’t have. His party did not learn the lessons he offered, and paid the price in the years that followed. Yes, they’re still in office today and perhaps about to start addressing the questions of Norman asked then. But just imagine what might have been if they’d paid more attention to one of their own back then and got started on that work a lot sooner.

This is the magic of some lies, and some of the liars who tell them. We willingly conspire in our own deception because of the way it makes us feel, and the comfort it brings. It’s even used as the inspirational finale of the Christmas classic Miracle on 34^th Street. “Which is worse: a lie that draws a smile or a truth that draws a tear?”. In the last decade, we’ve decided, quite firmly, to choose the lie. After all, who wants what Al Gore described as “inconvenient truth” when you can willingly suspend your disbelief and go along with promises of the moon and the stars, delivered yesterday and paid for by someone else?

My book of the decade is one that offers us a masterclass in the performative lying to which we are becoming accustomed: Gone Girl. I’m about to spoil the ending of this and several other novels of the last decade, so if you prefer your thrillers thrilling, and your plot twists fully twisted, skip to the end.

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Gone Girl is the story of a woman — Amy — who appears to have been murdered by her husband — Nick. The first half alternates between her husband’s account of her disappearance and entries from her diary. The diary tells the story of a woman abused and manipulated by a dangerous man. We feel, as we read, that her diary entries are showing us the real story, behind his professed innocence, and we suspect him more and more.

It’s half way through the book that we discover the diary is faked. She’d spent months planning her own disappearance and laying a trail of evidence in the pages of her journal that would implicate her husband. It was a plot to destroy him.

It’s a good novel. An enjoyable thriller. It’s clever in its use of domestic abuse as a theme: we increasingly understand that marriages which appear happy on the outside can mask almost anything that happens behind closed doors. The twists turn us into credulous fools; your desire to ‘believe the victim’ makes you a victim, too.

But what fascinates me about the novel is how much less enjoyable it is to spend time with Nick than it is with Amy — even after she’s revealed to be irretrievably awful. For most of the novel, he’s a hopeless drip and his attempts at revenge are easily outdone. Her determination to shape her own reality and force all those around her to conform to it may be horrifying, but it is compelling. I think we understand why, in the end, Nick stays with her. Perhaps he had read Francis Bacon’s essay ‘Of Truth’, which argues that truth will only ever be as beautiful as a pearl, while lies are like diamonds — beautiful in every light. Nothing is more seductive than a liar. Amy is a diamond.

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Gone Girl seemed to spark a trend for thrillers with these “unreliable narrators”: the critics’ label for an authorial trick where the person telling the story turns out to be deceiving you. The Girl on the Train: half of her memories turn out to be false. The Woman in the Window: she talks to her husband throughout, but he’s actually dead. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine: same, but it’s her mother who’s dead.

It’s almost got out of hand: if I pick up a modern thriller, I pretty much expect a plot twist like this. Think you committed a crime? You’ve been framed, or drugged, or lied to. A character who only exists on the phone? Definitely dead.

To be fair to The Woman in the Window, it has another set of plot twists that it took me slightly longer to see through. But if accounts are to be believed, the novel’s author, A. J. Finn, seems to be a champion of performative deception himself – a real life unreliable narrator who’s alleged to have made up stories including a PhD from Oxford, a brain tumour, and the death of his mother. He reminds me of our Prime Minister, and of President Trump, who both have relationships with truth that are even more casual than their relationships with women. After all, why let the facts get in the way of a good campaign slogan? Why choose a truth that draws a tear when you can have a lie that draws a smile?

This trend for unreliable narrators feels like part of the same phenomenon that enables people who play this game to make it to the top. We are now caught in a permanent twilight where every fact can be questioned, every truth undermined. Photos and videos can be faked. Every anecdote is questioned with the accusation that it “didn’t happen”. Social media has been a powerful force for the democratising of information but it’s also made it harder to tell what’s true and what’s false.

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I don’t mean we all fall for fake news all the time. Some people do, of course. But most people are good at questioning the reality of what we see — wondering who made it up and why. The problem is that means we need to question everything. We can never just stop and rely on one set of facts. It’s exhausting. Uncertainty and ambiguity are hard for our brains to process. So playing the game of truth and lies through fiction or politics offers us a release.

We love being sucked into the dramatic aura of an Amy or a Boris: into a vortex where we are released from the gravitational pull of the truth. We never really believe them. But we suspend our disbelief because it is convenient and comfortable. It offers us a chance to play out the fantasy of being able to shape our own reality: to say that this is so simply because I say it is. We get to be Gods for a moment. How can uncomfortable truths ever compete?

In the US, he says, “most of our annual weight gain occurs during the six-week holiday feasting period between Thanksgiving and the new year, and … this extra weight tends to stick with us after the holidays are over.” We don’t have to worry about Thanksgiving over here, but there are three other days — Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve — that are, Guyenet says, “the definition of overeating”. And that’s true in the UK, just as much as in the States.

Guyenet’s observations about the festive season are consistent with the fundamental thesis of his book: that “repeated bouts of overeating don’t just make us fat: they make our bodies want to stay fat.”

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We’ve all heard the statistics of the obesity crisis. But Guyenet reminds his reader of some standouts. In 1890, about 4% of white men of retirement age were obese, as measured by BMI; in 2000, 41% of them were. The leap has been especially dramatic since 1960 when just 13% of US adults were obese; by 2010, that figure was 35%.

Most of us also think we know what’s causing it. But it’s not as simple as received wisdom would have us believe.

For instance, says Guyenet, in 1909 Americans ate more calories per head than they did in 1960. But there was no obesity crisis in 1909, at least as far as we are aware. That’s nice and easy to explain: in 1909, far more Americans had jobs involving physical labour; by 1960, most people had desk jobs. Also, by 1960, far fewer people walked to work; instead, they drove. So in 1909, people expended far more calories.

This raises a puzzle, though. When, between 1909 and 1960, our calorie expenditure began to drop, we didn’t get fatter. Instead, we started eating less food.

This implies two things. One, there must be some sort of mechanism which regulates our calorie consumption — a system of homeostasis like that which maintains our body core temperature within 0.5°C despite wild temperature fluctuations in our environment. Our bodies “knew” in some way that we were using less energy, so started demanding less. People, in essence, became less hungry.

And two, since 1960, something has interfered with that regulatory system. We know that because our exercise levels have not increased significantly since 1960, and yet the calories we take in — and the levels of obesity in our societies — have gone up significantly.

What’s changed? Do we eat more fat? Do we eat more sugar? More carbohydrates? Is it that certain foods affect our metabolic rate?

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Guyenet’s argument is that we’re looking at it the wrong way. First, it’s not that some foods are more fattening because of how they affect our bodies — they’re more fattening because of how they affect our brains. And second, it’s not a particular food group; it’s not fat or carbs or sugar. It’s that we have become extraordinarily good at developing foods which are hard to resist, are full of calories, and which don’t fill us up. Essentially, through the simple workings of market capitalism, the food industry has been steadily optimising for the most obesogenic, “hyper-palatable” foods it is possible to make.

You can see it in rats. Until the 1970s, when researchers wanted to study obesity in rats, they added fat to the normal rodent food they gave them. But it didn’t work very well — the rats tended to simply eat less. It would take months to get appropriately fat rats. But then a researcher called Anthony Sclafani noticed that if he gave rats human junk food, they would eat past the point of satiety. They neglected their normal foods and gained weight at an incredible rate; in a few weeks, they were obese. Simple high-fat and high-sugar diets didn’t work, only the stuff that human ingenuity has designed to be as attractive as possible.

It also works on humans, unsurprisingly. In the 1990s, Eric Ravussin put people through an experiment in which high-calorie hyper-palatable foods were available all the time through free vending machines; they ate 173% of their calorie requirements, and put on 5lb in a week. Another study found that when given “palatable” food, people ate 44% more than if it was bland.

So far, so shocking: people eat more food if they like that food. But how does that break the regulatory system that stops us from getting overweight?

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Here is how the regulatory system works. All the fat cells in your body release a hormone, leptin. The more fat there is in your body, the more leptin there is in your bloodstream; it’s also released when you eat large amounts of high-calorie food.

Your body tries to keep its leptin levels constant — it ‘defends’ a certain set point. If you eat too much or gain weight, then your body will try to reduce either its calorie intake or its calorie expenditure, i.e. make you less hungry or make you more physically active. (One way it does the latter is by encouraging you to fidget! “Non-exercise activity thermogenesis”, NEAT, is the scientific term for regular posture changes, fidgeting, and jiggling around; one study found it can burn up to 700 calories a day, a third to a quarter of our required intake. Some people fidget much more when they’ve overeaten; those people are much less likely to put on weight.) If you lose weight, it’ll make you hungrier and more sluggish until you put the pounds back on.

But if you overeat regularly enough, your body will start to acclimate to its new leptin levels; just as loud music slowly damages your ears, your leptin receptors will become inured. Extremely attractive foodstuffs such as those we face in the modern environment, which attract us even when we’re not hungry — and which are calorie-dense but unsatisfying, so we don’t feel full even when we’ve eaten more calories than we need — are the equivalent of that loud music.

If your body finds itself defending a higher weight, and you lose weight, it will react as though you are literally starving. People who are obese but lose significant weight report vastly increased hunger and obsession with food — to the point of hoarding pictures of food, or collecting food utensils — in just the same way that healthy volunteers in a starvation experiment in the Second World War reacted to losing a quarter of their body weight.

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This is less of a problem for some people than for others. Obesity is highly hereditary: about 70% of the variance within a modern country like the US is genetic. If one identical twin is obese, the other is very likely to be; non-identical twins and siblings are more different; adopted siblings are essentially no more similar than total strangers would be.

The difference in NEAT-fidgeting appears to be heavily genetic. People simply have different levels of willpower and attraction to food. But for some people, it is almost impossible to resist the extremely attractive foods with which we are surrounded; they eat large amounts; their weight goes up, and their bodies acclimate to the new leptin levels; and then the same thing happens again. Hence the getting fatter at Christmas and never quite losing it, and then the same next year.

Luckily, says Guyenet, there is a way around it. But it’s a bit bleak. The problem is not fat, or carbs, or sugar. It’s not ultra-processed foods or crisps or sweets. It’s the fact that all this tasty stuff is being combined in increasingly tasty ways; the problem is that tasty food is really hard to stop eating. “What do we do,” asked Scott Alexander in his excellent review of Guyenet’s book, “when the enemy is deliciousness itself?”

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We eat bland food — nutrient-rich but flavourless, with low calorie density so you get full quickly. Experimenters in one small 1965 study found that grossly obese people ate hugely reduced amounts — 10% or less of their usual intake. They lost nearly two stone in less than a fortnight. One volunteer stuck to it for 255 days and lost 200lb — half his bodyweight.

The answer to obesity, then, appears to be limiting yourself only to extremely bland foods that don’t make you want to eat more. One guy put himself on a 20-potato-a-day diet, just plain potatoes with a little cooking oil. He was trying to show that potatoes are healthy; he worked for the Washington State Potato Commission. He didn’t want to lose weight, but did: 21lb in two months.

Guyenet himself put out a press release as an April Fools for the “Bland Food Cookbook” (sample recipe: “Potato. Ingredient: One large potato”) which was so on brand and in line with the logical implications of his food that a lot of people fell for it. It may be that the extremely depressing answer to obesity is “you should only eat food you don’t actually like”.

But that’s easy to say. I wish I could tell you that no mince pies were harmed in the writing of this article, but I just polished off my second. Merry Christmas; may the cheeseboard be fully loaded.

Prompted, at least in part, by 9/11, New Atheism rumbled through the ‘noughties’. It was noisiest towards the end of that decade, thanks the self-described ‘Four Horseman of the Apocalypse’: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. Dawkins’ The God Delusion,  Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith, God is not Great by Hitchens and Breaking the Spell by Dennett were all published in a cluster around 2007.

In 2009, British citizens were treated to the spectacle of the ‘Atheist Bus’ — a double decker advert declaring ‘There’s probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life’ — created by the comedian Ariane Sherine with the support of, again, Dawkins.

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The themes of the Four Horsemen’s treatises are now widely known: religion is dangerous and deeply irrational; only science, and the light of reason, can save humanity from the plague of superstition and violence it whips up.

Most religious responses took the bait. Some were shrill and ill-informed. The best, like The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath, did a good job of exploding the facile underpinnings of most of the arguments, but didn’t succeed in changing the terms of the debate. Unapologetic did. The first chapter was serialised run in full by the Guardian, for one thing.

For another, Spufford is a real writer, a writer’s writer. Picked as Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1997, he is unusual in publishing both critically acclaimed, commercially successful novels and books of non-fiction, as well as collections of essays. He is also a professor, teaching creative and life writing at Goldsmiths College. The book directly prior to Unapologetic was Red Plenty, about life in the USSR. This segue into religion came as a bit of a surprise, not least, apparently, to his agent.

So Spufford’s prose is hilarious and precise (but excruciating) as he acknowledges the worst caricatures of Christian belief: “Believers are the people touting a solution without a problem, and an embarrassing solution too, a really damp-palmed, wide-smiling, can’t-dance solution. In an anorak”. It helps that he has spent some time as an atheist. Spufford knows all the flaws and failings of religion. Yet he still wants to offer, not “a defence of Christian ideas [but] a defence of Christian emotions — of their intelligibility, of their grown up dignity”.

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He moves the debate out of the zero-sum dingdong about the Big Bang and biblical archaeology and philosophical proofs — and into the realm of feelings. And not because feelings are just easier (the clue is in “intelligibility and grown-up dignity”) but because for almost all of us, that’s what drives not just our metaphysics, but most of our deepest decisions.

Spufford was not alone in pushing in this direction. Although he had been writing about it in academic circles since the late nineties, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt also broke into the mainstream in 2012 with The Righteous Mind. Building on his earlier work “The emotional dog and its rational tail”, he updated the metaphor as an elephant and rider. Our emotional, intuitive judgements are the elephant, actually in charge, and our reasoning minds construct post-hoc rationalisations for why we wanted to go that way in the first place. Daniel Kahneman — a Nobel laureate psychologist and economist had made similar arguments in Thinking, Fast and Slow the previous year — and the work of Ian McGilchrist, among many others over the decade, all contributed to this growing sense that we are not as rational as we thought.

In seeking to shift the debate about religion into the realm of emotions, then, Spufford was not dodging the “real question”:

“If I say that, from inside, it makes much more sense to talk about belief as a characteristic set of feelings, or even as a habit, you will conclude that I am trying to wriggle out, or just possibly that I am not even interested in whether this crap I talk is true”.

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For the record, he does care, describing himself as a fairly orthodox believer who can recite the creeds. It’s not that he doesn’t think truth is important, but that arguments about whether God exists are self-defeating: “No, I can’t prove it. I don’t know if there’s a God (and neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins…it isn’t the kind of thing you can know. It isn’t a knowable item).”

Instead of getting stuck there, he agrees with the major move in social psychology and neuroscience this decade: “it is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I assent to the ideas”.

Crucially, he argues that this is true of everyone. It’s not only that religious people have faith because of their feelings — the opposite can be true:

“There are arguments to be made [against the existence of God]…but for a lot of people they function as a rationalisation after the event for a deep and emotional conviction that the universe is just not the kind of place in which such things can happen.”

The move is a good and persuasive one, but it’s the manner in which he writes about emotions that make the book so successful. There is no schmaltz; no earnest, dusty, churchy tone. Atheist philosopher John Gray called it, “a rare gem, a book that carries conviction by being honest all the way through”.

Whether describing sin — the crack in everything — as HPtFtU (the Human Propensity to Fuck things Up) or exploring the sense of divine mercy in Mozart’s Clarinet concerto, Spufford writes about the lived experience of faith more accurately and beautifully than anyone except Marilynne Robinson, Graham Greene and Dostoevsky (significantly all novelists).

People will still be reading this book once the new atheist polemics (and their religious responses) have been consigned to the recycling bin of history, because it is more powerful, more human, than any of them.

The 64MB phone in your pocket contains 512 million bits. Bits of what? Bits of information: every single one a little digital flipflop. It’s a one or it’s a zero. And yet get enough of those ones and zeros together in one place (with the help of some cunning technology) and you have a device that might as well be The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Speaking of the galaxy, did you know that we are able to make a pretty reliable estimate of how much information there is in the entire universe? “10⁹⁰ bits”, was the estimate of John Archibald Wheeler, then the last surviving collaborator of Einstein and Bohr. That’s a lot, obviously — but it’s a number you can write down. Mind securely blown.

What unites these two things — the phone in your pocket and the cosmos of which it’s an infinitesimal part — is information. And the question of how much information there is in something was effectively impossible to ask until relatively recently. If you’d asked a medieval librarian how much information there was in his library, or — for that matter — the head librarian at the British Library in 1947, they wouldn’t have understood the question. How can an amount of information be measured?

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That’s where my book of the decade comes in. We live in the “information age”, but until I read James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011), I had little or no idea what that actually meant. It’s the story of how we learnt to measure information, and it begins with a man called Claude Shannon, a mathematician who worked for Bell Labs in the 1940s. 

Bell was a telephone company, and a big one: “By 1948 more than 125 million conversations passed daily through the Bell System’s 138 million miles of cable and 31 million telephone sets.” Like its similarly vast successor Google, it didn’t mind giving its research people the chance to tinker around. With its “vast, monopolistic” mission, writes Gleick, “AT&T at midcentury did not demand instant gratification from its research division.” 

Anyway, what Shannon published in 1948 was a paper in an in-house magazine (The Bell System Technical Journal) called “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”. He was seeking to answer, in a systematic way, the question of what it actually was that all those miles of telephone cable were carrying. Conversations? Words? Electricity, obviously. But how do you measure that stuff? Reading the volts and amps won’t tell you much about what Mavis said to Dolly when they had a natter this morning. 

Shannon proposed the idea of a thing called a “bit”, which he described as “A unit for measuring information”. And so “Information Theory” was born. A bit is a binary digit: something is either there, or it’s not. It has a value of 0 or a value of 1. This is a tiny unit, and a quite dizzyingly big idea.

When it was made simple — distilled, counted in bits — information was found to be everywhere. Shannon’s theory made a bridge between information and uncertainty; between information and entropy; and between information and chaos. 

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A bit is the atomic unit of information, in other words, and once you start to see the little buggers, it turns out they are all over the shop. Economies are systems of information. So are people. DNA, for instance, is replicable, measurable information that comes with all the other properties of information: noise and signal, deterioration in transmission, and so on. Evolution “embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment”. Matter itself can be understood in informational terms — as Gleick puts it rather poetically,  

“When photons and electrons and other particles interact, what are they really doing? Exchanging bits, transmitting quantum states, processing information. The laws of physics are the algorithms. Every burning star, every silent nebula, every particle leaving its ghostly trace in a cloud chamber is an information processor. The universe computes its own destiny.”

If, as has been argued, information is the stuff that underpins the very fabric of the universe, then this really is a theory of everything.

The joys of Gleick’s book are his ability to explain some pretty complex mathematical issues in a way that non-mathematicians will be able to understand; the fantastically agile connections he makes; and the engrossing examples he uses. Where he writes about entropy and chaos, information is an ice-cube in the gin-and-tonic of randomness, a temporary state of organisation.

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After introducing Shannon, for instance (who en passant we meet having lunch with Alan Turing), Gleick zips back to look at African talking drums. The funny thing about these drums — which could communicate complex messages over large distances, and were understood by everybody — is that they seemed to send much more information than was necessary. If a drummer wanted to say “come home”, the message would be: “Make your feet come back the way they went/ make your legs come back the way they went,/ plant your feet and your legs below,/ in the village which belongs to us.” 

This looks like inefficiency — but it’s the opposite. The drums replicate a tonal language, and a common two-tone word, on the drums, could be any word with the same two tones — but glossed with recognisable standard formulas, like Homeric epithets, the meaning becomes clear. They were — not that they’d put it that way — recognising the necessity to “allocate extra bits for disambiguation and error correction”. Redundancy helps overcome ambiguity. Like when army signallers say “Bravo Victor Tango” rather than “BVT” to prevent mishearing. 

A mathematical understanding of communication starts to make it possible to talk about how that works – and to see how information isn’t just about saying stuff, but about creating a structure out of a chaotic field of possibilities. Information, as one writer put it, is “negative entropy”. Gleick gallops on through Morse code, the multilayered history of written language, the ideas behind logarithms and computation, telegraphy, cryptography, Russell and Godel, towards the compression of digital signals that makes it possible, among other things, for me to watch Wonder Woman on Netflix.  

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The genius here is that Gleick gives you all the technological history, from cuneiform to cybernetics, but at the same time gives you the theoretical underpinnings — the basic ideas in probabilities and logic that make possible everything we do. That make it possible, in fact, for me to transmit this article to UnHerd, and for you to make sense of it. Make it possible for me to be here in the first place, and you likewise, come to that. 

“I think that this present century,” Shannon said in a speech at the University of Pennsylvania, “in a sense will see a great upsurge and development of this whole information business; the business of collecting information and the business of transmitting it from one point to another, and perhaps most important of all, the business of processing it.” He was certainly onto something there. 

And that’s why this book really is essential for making sense of the way we live now. It describes a revolution in the way we understand the world arguably as far-reaching and tentacular as the development of the written word; and, indeed, it encompasses that.

But in his closing chapters – which cover everything from the growth of Wikipedia to David Foster Wallace’s grim warnings of “Total Noise” — Gleick addresses what it means to be drowning in the present-day’s flood of information. How do we sift meaning from all this “information overload”?  

I was on the panel for the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction (as it then was) the year Gleick’s book was published and it remains a source of regret to me that I wasn’t able to get his book on the shortlist. It’s stayed with me longer than many of the books that got further in the competition. It not only helps you make sense of the digital world (or neurobiology, or macroeconomics, or astrophysics, or linguistics), but also to glimpse the very foundations on which it’s built. That’s got to be worth — so to speak — a bit of your time.