Ayn Rand – ‘Ayn’ pronounced ‘I-n’ – was born Alisa Rosenbaum in St Petersburg in 1905. The child star of a bourgeois Jewish family, she was well educated at home and at school until her life was disrupted by the Russian Revolution. She determined early on to keep her stellar status. At the age of sixteen, she enrolled as a history student at Petrograd University. Then, aged twenty-one, she emigrated to the United States, settling in Hollywood, of all places. Startlingly, the ‘little immigrant girl’ impressed Cecil B DeMille and became a scriptwriter for silent films of the sort she had devoured passionately back in Russia, at the rate of a hundred a year. With the coming of talkies in 1927, her inability to write plausible English dialogue – an inability she never lost – put paid to that career. But she kept pushing, trying to earn a living in the dream factories. In 1943 her second novel, The Fountainhead, achieved astounding success. In 1949, it was made into a film starring Gary Cooper. Rand, by then a bestselling author and possessing a mad self-confidence, insisted on including in the screenplay every word of a long speech made by the hero, which ruined the film. But this did nothing to dim her reputation. Her books, unreadable to anyone but a dazzled adolescent, have sold thirty-six million copies up to today.

Rand in the 1930s jerry-rigged a political philosophy, the simplicities of which for a while seduced many an American. During the 1940s and 1950s, she was much in demand on TV shows and university campuses. Her most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged, appeared in 1957 and became another bestseller, despite clocking in at over a thousand pages. At the heart of her novels and her philosophising were individualism and anti-statism. In the 20th century, these principles provided one of two main routes to what in the United States is called ‘libertarianism’. The word names what normal people call classical liberalism – the outlook of Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville and J S Mill. From the 1880s, in Britain and then in the United States, a ‘new’ liberalism, in which the state was more and more empowered to do good by coercing you, made off with the L-word. So another one was coined, and still puzzles. The second main route to liberalism, taken by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, the Russian journalist and novelist Vasily Grossman and the English essayist and novelist George Orwell (born in the same decade as Rand), was from socialism. 

A commitment to liberalism does not, as Alexandra Popoff insists in her charmingly anecdotal and revealing, if often tedious, biography, make one a ‘conservative’ or place one on the ‘extreme right’. (One does wish that one’s dear friends on the left would stop forcing classical liberalism onto the seating