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“... When​ Britain left the EU on 31 January, led by a prime minister commanding a fresh eighty-seat majority in the House of Commons, a line (of sorts) was drawn under the most turbulent period in the country’s recent political history. The past four years have witnessed one historic referendum, two general elections, two major upsets at the ballot box, three prime ministers, the birth of the Brexit Party and multiple anti-Brexit groups, a Supreme Court judgment that the prime minister had behaved unlawfully, and much else along the way ...”

“... From​ the 1920s until the 1990s, as Quinn Slobodian describes in Globalists (2018), his history of neoliberal thought, Austrian and German free-market thinkers had a common ideal of legally ‘encasing’ the market, in order to leave it safe from political harm. Price signals could be compared with an electrical current flowing down copper wires at lightning speed ...”

“... About​ five years ago, in the course of studying the commercial applications of psychological research, I contacted the agent of Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University, to inquire whether Ariely might want to speak at a conference in London. It didn’t come off: I had to explain that my ‘conference budget’ didn’t stretch to the $75,000 speaker fee and first-class return airfare ...”

“... There​ are two types of people: professional social scientists and amateur social scientists. To put that another way, a central problem of social science is that, unlike natural science, your objects of study have their own account of who they are and what they’re doing. The professional demographer may classify someone according to a set of categories widely recognised among experts, but unrecognisable or even offensive to the person being classified ...”

“... Britain​ is entering a crisis in mortgage repayments that nobody can ignore, but which nobody in power seems willing to prevent. In May, the average interest rate for a two-year fixed rate mortgage passed 6 per cent, a reflection of market expectations regarding Bank of England rate rises, which are in turn a response to the sustained difficulty of getting inflation down ...”

“... The​ words ‘market’ and ‘capitalism’ are frequently used as if they were synonymous. Especially where someone is defending the ‘free market’, it is generally understood that they are also making an argument for ‘capitalism’. Yet the two terms can also denote very different sets of institutions and logics. According to the taxonomy developed by the economic historian Fernand Braudel, they may even be opposed to each other ...”

“... In the month​ leading up to the Chris Pincher scandal, which finally did for Boris Johnson, there was a flurry of bleak news about the state and future of the British economy. Inflation hit a forty-year high of 9.1 per cent, and the Bank of England announced its fifth interest rate rise since December, to 1.25 per cent. At the end of June, Andrew Bailey, the governor of the bank, admitted that inflation in the UK – triggered by a combination of war in Ukraine and supply-chain bottlenecks in the wake of Covid lockdowns – is likely to endure for longer than in the United States or mainland Europe ...”

“... The phrase​ ‘hard-working families’, a staple of New Labour and Conservative rhetoric for about twenty years, fell by the wayside with the political upheavals of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015 and the resignation of David Cameron the following summer. (Theresa May initially hoped to refocus on ‘JAMs’ – Just About Managing families – but lost all ideological confidence along with her parliamentary majority in June last year ...”

“... Justice is what love looks like in public,’ Cornel West said some years ago, a slogan now so well-known that you see it on T-shirts and posters, a kind of ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ or ‘This House Runs on Love, Laughter and Prosecco’ for the activist left. It’s an engaging claim. But is it true? At first glance, justice and love have entirely different, even contradictory, qualities, and elision flatters both ...”

“... There​ are two broad narratives about what has happened to universities in the English-speaking world over the past forty years. They are very different from each other, yet both have some plausibility. The first runs roughly as follows. The rise of the New Right in the 1980s introduced a policy agenda for universities aimed at injecting enterprise and competition into a sector that had previously seen itself as somewhat insulated from the market ...”

“... George Osborne​ gets booed at the London Olympics. Suella Braverman cracks gags during her visit to a half-built asylum detention centre in Rwanda. Boris Johnson is illegally presented with a birthday cake. A Tory staffer throws up as the exit poll drops. David Cameron keeps his bladder full all night to achieve maximum focus during EU negotiations ...”

“... The​ period of human history when European people could confidently characterise themselves as ‘modern’ lasted barely a hundred years, from the upheavals of the 1870s to those of the 1970s. This was the era in which the bureaucratic nation-state appeared to have been secured as the building block of geopolitical power, and the welfare state became essential to the pursuit of social justice ...”

“... Early​ in 2014, the Bank of England put out a quarterly bulletin entitled ‘Money Creation in the Modern Economy’ which put to bed one of the most persistent – and false – claims in the history of economics. According to orthodox economists as far back as Adam Smith, money originates in the need to exchange one good for another. I have produced more bread than I need, you have produced more clothing than you need, and we need some simple instrument by means of which to swap one for the other ...”

“... Perhaps we could start with you telling us what you understand by the term “plagiarism”.’ I don’t know how many times I’ve spoken these words over the last two years. Twenty or thirty perhaps. In my role as chair of the exam board in my department it falls to me to chair plagiarism hearings, and this awkward icebreaker serves as a way of establishing whether or not the student concerned understands the allegation being made ...”

“... Before​ Labour took power in July, there was a lot of talk about ‘foundations’, and it has continued since. The second chapter of the party’s election manifesto was titled ‘Strong Foundations’. On the fourth day of the new administration, Rachel Reeves gave a speech outlining the ways she planned to ‘fix the foundations of our economy ...”