Geoff Mann

One of​ the fabulous stories that unfolds at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier, the Paris apartment building at the centre of Georges Perec’s novel Life: A User’s Manual, concerns an Englishman called Percival Bartlebooth. While he is still youngish, Bartlebooth – heir to money enough to live as an idle aristocrat – decides to dedicate himself and his fortune to a peculiar...

More than​ 43,000 people were killed with guns in the United States in 2023. That’s around one death every twelve minutes. More than half of those deaths were suicides or accidents, almost 19,000 were homicides, and guns were among the leading causes of death among children and teenagers. According to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incident resulting in...

It’s​ easy to forget that this isn’t the first time the world has seemed to teeter on a precipice. ‘To the question how shall we ever be able to extricate ourselves from the obvious insanity of this position, there is no answer,’ Hannah Arendt wrote fifty years ago, reflecting on the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union. Then, as now, an apocalyptic...

On​ 14 November 1968, New York University hosted a debate between the economists Walter Heller and Milton Friedman at the Graduate School of Business, a block from Wall Street. The event was advertised as a confrontation between two men engaged in a war for the soul of American economic policy. In retrospect, it might not sound like a clash of the titans – Milton Friedman versus who?...