As the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims on how to restore balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor, Freidrich Hayek, who considered attempts to intervene both pointless and potentially dangerous. The battle lines thus drawn, Keynesian economics would dominate for decades and coincide with an era of unprecedented prosperity, but conservative economists and political leaders would eventually embrace and execute Hayek's contrary vision. From their first face-to-face encounter to the heated arguments between their ardent disciples, Nicholas Wapshott here unearths the contemporary relevance of Keynes and Hayek, as present-day arguments over the virtues of the free market and government intervention rage with the same ferocity as they did in the 1930s.

In 1966 two columnists joined Newsweek magazine. Their assignment: debate the world of business and economics. Paul Samuelson was a towering figure in Keynesian economics, which supported the management of the economy along lines prescribed by John Maynard Keynes's General Theory. Milton Friedman, little known at that time outside conservative academic circles, championed "monetarism" and insisted the Federal Reserve maintain tight control over the amount of money circulating in the economy. In the nimble hands of author and journalist Nicholas Wapshott, Samuelson and Friedman's decades-long argument becomes a window through which to view one of the longest periods of economic turmoil in the United States. As the soaring economy of the 1950s gave way to decades stalked by declining prosperity and "stagflation", it was a time when the theory and practice of economics became the preoccupation of politicians and the focus of national debate. It is an argument that continues today.

New details of the remarkable relationship between two leaders who teamed up to change history.
It's well known that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were close allies and kindred political spirits. During their eight overlapping years as U.S. president and UK prime minister, they stood united for free markets, low taxes, and a strong defense against communism. But just how close they really were will surprise you.
Nicholas Wapshott finds that the Reagan-Thatcher relationship was much deeper than an alliance of mutual interests. Drawing on extensive interviews and hundreds of recently declassified private letters and telephone calls, he depicts a more complex, intimate, and occasionally combative relationship than has previously been revealed.

Nicholas Wapshott follows Keynes Hayek with a lively narrative of one of the great political duels of the twentieth century: the high-stakes maneuvering among Franklin Roosevelt, Joe Kennedy, and the isolationist movement before America s entry into World War II. FDR sidelined his friend and aspiring political rival Kennedy by appointing him ambassador to London. He coaxed Charles Lindbergh into uniform to control the content of his speeches. Roosevelt s cryptic and varied strategies contained and ultimately neutralized the most powerful voices encouraging American skepticism about a European war. Leading his country into that war would define FDR s legacy.

Set against the backdrop of the 1940 election, The Sphinx testifies to FDR s political mastery while placing both sides of the debate over isolationism in context, provoking arguments about whether the neo-isolationists of today are any more right than Kennedy and his allies were in their time."