Writers of books are generally advised to pen an eye-catching first sentence: and Priestland has certainly done that: 'Future generations will see 2008 as a year of tectonic shifts-a year to be classed alongside 1917, 1929, 1945, 1968 and 1989' (p. 1). A bold claim indeed. Furthermore, policymakers seem unable to grapple with the enormity of what occurred in 2008, and are therefore unable to produce ways in which to try and deal with it. Nor is Preistland for that matter: 'this essay does not pretend to offer a blueprint for world recovery and enduring human happiness' (p. 2). So what precisely is the point of said essay? A much more modest aim-to lay the foundations for such blueprints by rethinking the past: 'History is the only kind of guide we have to the future, and so before we can go forward, we have to go back-to understand how we got to where we are, what has gone wrong, and why' (p. 2). This is hardly splitting the atom-Hobbes wrote in 1650 that: 'No man can have in his mind a conception of the future, for the future is not yet. But of our conceptions of the past, we make a future.' (Southgate, 2001) But still.
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