The times are propitious for John Gray to publish a selection of four decades’ worth of writing. He has spent a career pointing out the needy tendency of human beings to accept easy dogmas. The last few months have shown how vulnerable our fond delusions of stability are. We had solved the problems of economics and conquered risk; the system was the best that could be devised; so why not allocate reward in advance as if downturn, let alone meltdown, had been banished?

All good things come to an end: yesterday’s article of faith dies an ignominious death. After the desolation comes political change. We have seen it in the United States; and we shall in all probability see it in Britain in the next fourteen months. Gray’s dissection of modern