Monthly Archives: March 2008

The Dismal Science

Popular economics hit the bestseller list in 2005 with Steven D Levitt’s Freakonomics, which sold by the bucketload and established a template that, for the time being at least, no aspiring economic populariser would dare to tamper with. Certainly, Tim Harford’s The Logic of Life and Robert H Frank’s The Economic Naturalist stick closely to [...]

Common Reading

Surveying the “railway stalls” where the modern reader bought his literature in 1855, Walter Bagehot observed that a large space was filled by the “review-like essay and the essay-like review.” The best examples of this genre were couched in an unbuttoned, digressive style, more like the “talk of the man of the world” than the [...]