A review of Return to Growth: How to Fix the UK Economy: Volume II (Biteback, 2025) by Jon Moynihan.
There is something rarely admitted in academic literature. This is that most books should be essays, most essays should be aphorisms, most aphorisms should be printed in fortune cookies and presented to the author as a warning. There are exceptions to this rule of course. Hugh Trevor-Roper was as good at writing essays as any of the great 19th century writers (Macaulay, Morley etc.), and there is still an academic at Oxford, Peter Ghosh, who writes articles instead of books, and whose articles (on Marx, Mill etc.) are better than books. Another exception is Jon Moynihan. Throw away any Penguin book you have bought in the last 10 years: you will do this eventually. They are almost all unreadable, though well packaged. But Moynihan’s two volumes, Return to Growth, are books worth reading. They would simply not have the same force if they were shorter.
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