One of my main functions within Oxfam seems to be to review books to spare everyone else the effort. Last week, I was on Piketty duty. Batches of campaigns and policy types sat in suitable veneration around a copy of the giant tome, and I talked them through this two page ‘Pocket Piketty’. The Potted Piketty (longer summary here) From

Spent last week on a remote Welsh island, Skokholm (if it sounds like Stockholm, I think that’s because the Vikings invaded it at some point). There was nothing to do except watch the achingly cute puffins arriving with beak-fulls of eels and try and dive down the burrows to their waiting chicks before the lurking gulls could grab them. One

From the intro to ‘Capital in the 21st Century’, a taste of his great approach to learning, the easy discursive style, (but also why the book is 600 pages long – succinct he ain’t. I’ve got to page 164): “To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely