Friedrich Hayek has been accused of many things. His fans have eulogised him as the greatest 20th-century philosopher of classical liberalism, as a deep thinker who exposed the innate flaws in planned economies and who provided the intellectual foundation for the reform programmes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. His detractors have called him an […]
Sven Beckert, a Harvard professor, has written a very long history of capitalism. As its subtitle suggests, ‘Capitalism: A Global History’ covers all of the inhabited world and spans a millennium, starting with 12th-century merchants trading through the port city of Aden. The enterprise is of more than purely historical interest. As Beckert points out, […]
Our staff and contributors have rounded up some of their favourite works of the year, and whether you’re after a history of English poetry or a sleazy Frenchman’s account of a trip to Lanzarote, there’s something for everyone in CapX’s Books of 2025. Robert Colvile, CapX Editor-in-Chief Since we’ve all had enough of politics at […]
What a few months it’s been. War continues to rage in Europe and the Middle East, Labour are U-turning like they’ve suffered a stroke at the wheel and we’ve watched the US President say fu*k on live TV – it’s time for a holiday. Whether you’re spending it in Great Yarmouth or on the Dalmatian […]
Between rumours that its current lead might have been planning an early exit, plummeting viewing figures and seemingly never-ending criticism that ‘Doctor Who’ has gone woke, there is a low-level murmur of online speculation that the BBC might be about to, or indeed should call time on the long-running show. If the TARDIS’ current inhabitant […]
The year is 1980, and 44 years have passed since Britain’s socialist revolution. A new generation has grown up, which has no active memories of capitalism, and only a hazy concept of what ‘capitalism’ even was. This is the premise of the book ‘The First Workers Government‘ by Gilbert Mitchison, published in 1934. An unnamed […]
Marc Sidwell For pure economic geekery, I’ve recently downloaded a free pdf of ‘The Socialist Calculation Debate’ by Peter Boettke and others, which despite the dry title is a gripping piece of intellectual history and highly relevant today, as misguided politicians turn back to economics as a tool of social engineering. Meanwhile it’s been a […]
After a tumultuous European Championship, a landslide electoral victory for Labour and schizophrenic weather, you might feel like getting away from it all. Well, there’s no better way to do this than burying yourself in a good book. That’s why we’ve asked CapX contributors and editors for their book recommendations for lazy summer days. Marc […]
Sanobar and her son lived in a single room accommodation. The nine-year-old boy was so terrified of coronavirus that he wouldn’t go to school during lockdown, despite being entitled to as a vulnerable child. In fact, he would not leave the ‘four wall boundary’ for weeks and barely left the bed on which he slept, […]
This week CapX is republishing some of our favourite articles of the year. This piece first appeared on November 1. James O’Brien, broadcaster, polemicist and “conscience of liberal Britain”, has written a book, How To Be Right… in a world gone wrong. If you’re not familiar with O’Brien’s output, he’s carved out a viral niche […]
Over the Christmas week, CapX is republishing its favourite pieces from the past year. You can find the full list here. ‘Crash Bang Wallop: The Inside Story of London’s Big Bang and a Financial Revolution that Changed the World’ by Iain Martin (Sceptre) In 1986, at the height of the greatest deal-making frenzy the City […]
At the end of this turbulent and traumatic political year, we asked our contributors to pick their favourite read of 2016. Most were published in the past 12 months, but some older favourites were selected as their insights were deemed to have a renewed relevance. ‘Algorithms to Live By’ by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths Chosen by […]
There are journalists who master economics, and economists who master journalism. But few bridge the gap with quite such fluency as Tim Harford. As the Financial Times’s “Undercover Economist”, as well as a BBC radio presenter and prolific author, Harford has a gift for explaining economic theories and findings in the most accessible way possible. […]
‘Crash Bang Wallop: The Inside Story of London’s Big Bang and a Financial Revolution that Changed the World’ by Iain Martin (Sceptre) In 1986, at the height of the greatest deal-making frenzy the City of London had ever seen, the US brokerage giant Salomon Brothers was in advance negotiations to buy the venerable British firm […]
Seven years after being commissioned, with 150 witnesses heard, over 150,000 documents scrutinised, and more than ten million pounds spent, the Iraq Inquiry will finally be released on July 6th this year. The long-awaited report on Britain’s role in the Iraq War is set to tell a devastating tale of astonishing incompetence. ‘Chilcot’ the play, […]
The political profile is a paradoxical thing, and that is part of its fascination. Power is rarely introspective: at its height it is usually unable to reflect or describe itself, and even at rest the last person you would ask for insight into the politician is the politician. But there comes a phase in political […]
Money Changes Everything. How Finance Made Civilization Possible. William N. Goetzmann. Princeton University Press, RPR £24.95 William Goetzmann in his new book takes readers on a whirlwind tour of financial history starting in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago and leading up to an outlook what a roadmap into the future might look like. A professor at the […]
Radiohead’s new album A Moon Shaped Pool is the best work the band has produced since they began working over twenty years ago. It’s also their most artistically consistent creation. The album begins with Burn The Witch, pre-released as a music video. It exerts a visceral demand on our attention. Using the imagery of 1960s children’s television […]
What goes on when the movie is over and the lights come up? How does the film come to be projected onto the silver screen in the first place? Step into The Flick, a run-down movie theatre in Massachusetts, and see life through the eyes of the three disaffected employees who lurk in the shadows […]
Ben Wheatley and his wife Amy Jump have adapted J.G.Ballard’s prophesy of affluenza and anger into film, seven years after Ballard’s death. The maverick British film director and script writer have incorporated the ridiculous cars, lapels and shagpile sideburns of the 70s in the re-working of his dystopian futuristic social commentary, High Rise. Tom Hiddleston, one […]
In Andrey Tarkovsky’s only written work, the visionary Russian director recounts the letters he received from the public in response to his semi-autobiographical film Mirror. The content of the letters is varied and yet one theme recurs over and over again: “Everything that torments me, everything I have and that I long for, that makes me […]
London. Its epithets trip automatically, almost thoughtlessly, off the tongue: financial centre, world city. Go back a few centuries and you find them still: birthplace of modern parliamentary democracy, the city that ended the slave trade. Rich with history, re-imagined countless times in literature, London has squatted in the global consciousness for half a thousand […]
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