15 NOVEMBER 2008, Page 40

George Osborne

In the fashionable rush to re-read Keynes, Galbraith and Friedman on the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression, don’t neglect an emerging batch of modern writers on the current crisis. Robert Shiller’s The Subprime Solution (Princeton, $16.99) is the best short study I’ve read of what went wrong in the US and how we might fix it. Niall Fergusson has just published a timely and brilliant new financial history of the world, The Ascent of Money (Allen Lane, £25). And if you want to escape all the doom and gloom this Christmas, you must turn of course to my wife’s gripping tale of the woman who scandalised Edwardian London and White Mischief Kenya (The Bolter, Virago, £18.99).