This event is exclusive to Friends of Tortoise
Niall Ferguson has been described in The Times as “the most brilliant British historian of his generation.” His new book, DOOM: The Politics of Catastrophe, is a timely and fresh evaluation of how and why the world has got itself into such a mess. Drawing on the lessons of historical disasters from the eruption of Vesuvius to the Black Death, it asks why – despite all the benefits of modern science – the world bungled its Covid response? It is not just a history but a general theory of disaster, which digs deeper than common analyses of the rise of populism to explain how we got here, and goes on to articulate how ‘governments must learn to become less bureaucratic if we are to avoid the impending doom of irreversible decline.
Niall Ferguson is one of Britain’s most renowned historians. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing.
You can buy Niall’s book here.