Allen Lane would have done well to have produced an edition properly tailored to a domestic audience. I also wonder why a book published here by a British historian is presented in Americanese, even if Ferguson does now live in the US. Much of Ferguson’s story is told with zest, with extracts from Monty Python, Daniel Defoe and the poetry of John Donne deployed in the course of his arguments, although at other times his text is challenging. there many new insights here, notably that for all the criticisms levelled at Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and others, it’s facile to blame the person at the top for all that goes wrong when usually the real culprit in a catastrophe is a system failure. it’s historical analysis of how disasters occur, rather than his crystal ball gazing, that’s the most interesting part of his book.
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