THE ROMANTIC ECONOMIST, by William Nicolson. Short Books, 2013, 304 pp., ￡12 (hardcover)
Right at the end of "The Romantic Economist" — nonspoiler alert! — the author William Nicolson starts referring in the third person to "William Nicolson," the protagonist of the pages. It was an unsettling moment.
I had imagined that I was reading a straightforward personal reminiscence; "a memoir with an economic twist" is how Nicolson describes it early on. Now my brain frazzled with the idea that the book was an altogether more postmodern exercise. "What the hell is going on?" I said out loud. I was reading it on a plane and the man next to me shifted uneasily in his seat.