Roland Huntford

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Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared

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Granta Books 261pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

The only Swedish entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations is: ‘Dost thou not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?’ These winged words might have been coined for Fishing in Utopia. They come from Axel Oxenstierna, Chancellor of Sweden in the seventeenth century under the formidable warrior-king Gustavus Adolphus. Oxenstierna founded the modern Swedish state, the latest manifestation of which is the subject of this book.

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