Sam Mendes’s 1917 is the talk of Oscar season – but when I went to see it I was prepared to be disappointed. My fears had nothing to do with the film’s cast or crew. The trouble is that the subject matter is hardly virgin territory. Make a film about the First World War and you are pitting yourself against Renoir and Kubrick, to say nothing of Blunden, Sassoon, Jünger and Remarque – and that’s before you even get to the poets. It is a high bar for any new artistic treatment.
I have to confess that I had a similar sense of trepidation when I began Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan’s Sabotage. As its title suggests, this is a book about what is wrong with finance and how to reform it. Moreover, much of the evidence it adduces to answer these questions consists of case studies from the financial crisis of 2007-09.
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