"Varoufakis’ brief history of capitalism unspools with characteristic fluency and verve, covering thousands of years of civilisation shot through with literary references. Doctor Faustus is used to explain debt relief, market forces find echoes in the Greek myths — even The Matrix becomes a Marxist metaphor. True to form, Varoufakis’s narrative has more than a slight leftwing bent. But those seeking to better understand the 'black magic' of bankers should look no further."

"So much contemporary discourse assumes that economics functions outside of politics, and that it is best left to professional economists and mathematicians. Varoufakis wants to smash this barrier: he argues from the outset that if we defer to experts on the economy then we hand over all our most important political decisions to them. He has decided to use Karl Polanyi’s term 'the market society' throughout. So although he is describing the history of capitalism, he dispenses with the actual term, believing it to be accompanied by too much ideological baggage. 'Market society' is preferred to the equally loaded 'market economy' – as in Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase that 'there is no alternative' to a market economy. Varoufakis is determined to show that politics can always produce an alternative economics. He lays out where money comes from in the simple terms he has promised [...] Varoufakis comes up with a vivid comparison between money supply and the market in cigarettes in a German prisoner-of-war camp to explain inflation, deflation and interest rates, in terms any teenager – or adult – will understand. [...] His line of argument is at the opposite end of the spectrum to Thatcher’s comparison between a household budget and the economy – itself aligned with the assumption that economics is a neutral science, set apart from politics. For Varoufakis, economics is always politics, because whoever controls the money has the power [...] Varoufakis goes outside the territory usually associated with economics, ranging from antiquity through to the pre-modern period, industrialisation and beyond. And he is as keen to look forward as back, conjuring up post-human dystopian futures in the style of The Matrix. [...] while his debunking of ideology is a virtue of the book, his emphasis on the deliberate cultivation of authority by rulers as a mechanism of control – from organised religion to the new secular religion of economics – misses out on a psychological understanding that people at times cleave to power and authority."