The Modern British Data State, 1945–2000

newspaper editors and reporters to print ‘fake’ news, a Victorian phenomenon extensively studied by historians and by no means an innovation of the twenty-first century. Fisher-Høyrem needed to be as concerned with critically examining immutability as he was with mobility. Nevertheless, the case studies are very well synthesised, and the vast and diverse historiography is presented in an engaging manner. Even the rather complex narrative of the origin of banknotes (Chapter 5) is presented in a manner accessible to readers without a background in complicated monetary history. His argument that this technological artefact helped to solve what economic historians would call the ‘timeinconsistency’ problem by rendering public debt an economic entity in perpetuity is very well explained. If we disregard the author’s tendency to often repeat how the networks examined ‘mediated secular time independent of motion’, then this book is eminently readable.