What happens next? Gauging the fallout from the pandemic
What just happened? Some 15 months after the pandemic first struck, it’s still horribly unclear, which is perhaps why there have been no decent books making sense of Covid-19. This is not just about a virus but a collision of politics, panic, digital media, human behaviour and incompetence. Niall Ferguson’s Doom looks at each of these aspects, putting them into historical perspective in a book of dazzling range and rigour. He offers several answers — and none of them is comforting. For most of human history, viruses were unexceptional — hard to research, because no one thought them remarkable. When plagues struck in the Middle Ages, we’d rush into quarantine,
