The Money Wars
The Ledger
Book One · 1944–2008
The architecture of post-war British money, built by no one in particular. Told through the institutional record and a cast of composite officials, it shows how a great many defensible decisions added up to a machine nobody designed.
The Valve
Book Two · 1971–2026
On 15 August 1971 the dollar’s link to gold was cut, and Britain had to improvise a new monetary system. This book argues it became a dual-channel state: generous upward, scarce downward, and never once named in public.
Debts of War
Book Three · 1914–1923
The First World War told through its financing, not its fighting: the loans, the gold and the requisitioned savings, and how, across eight months of 1917, the world’s creditor position passed from London to New York.
The Cork on the Sea
Book Four · Sovereignty, Financialisation, and the Brexit Settlement
A nation that lives on the world’s money can close its borders to people and goods, but never to capital. Why taking back control gave sovereignty away, most sharply along a border drawn down the Irish Sea.
Don’t Tell Sid
Book Five · How Britain Sold Itself
In 1986 Sid was invited to become an owner. Forty years later a company abroad owns his gas. The story of privatisation told at the letterbox, where the promise was made, partly kept and finally broken.
A Nation of Tenants
Book Six · How Britain Stopped Building, 1979–2026
How the council estate was sold, and why nothing replaced it. Not a pamphlet against the Right to Buy, but a history of the quiet figures, set in Whitehall, that decided how Britain would live.
Middle Powers
Book Seven · Coming 2027
Britain, America, and the price of a world role, 1956–1968: sterling as a reserve currency, and what it cost to keep a seat at the top table. Subscribe to Stock and Foil to hear when it is published.
Poetry, in the Style of…
Famous lines retold twice over: the true story in prose on the left, a new poem in a well-loved poet’s manner on the right.
Money
Volume One · The history of money, retold in verse
Sixty-eight episodes, from King Midas to the 2022 squeeze, each told in prose and then as a new poem in the manner of Betjeman, Burns, Dickinson, Milligan, Pam Ayres and others.
Love
Volume Two · The history of love, retold in verse
A hundred famous lines about love, from Genesis to 2004, and the stories behind them — often not the ones we think we know — retold in the manner of twenty-four poets, from Shakespeare to Wendy Cope.
Time
Volume Three · Coming 2027
The third volume of the series. Subscribe to Stock and Foil to hear when it is published.
The poems in Poetry, in the Style of… are original works written in the manner of the poets named. They are not by, and are not endorsed by, those poets or their estates.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.