Entropy: GET IT DONE! We seem to have arrived at a bleak post-contemporary present where nothing has depth or traction or consequence. A resolution of that terrible inundation coming from all sides at once: our ultimate ecological, cultural, financial and moral collapse. I had the notion that somewhere behind and beyond the sharp-eyed sociological expeditions she undertakes was a General Theory of Everything. Knowles’s book acted on me like a goad, a stone in the shoe. An elite cadre of Noahs with pairs of butlers, cooks, cleaners, sailors and security operatives. When the ice has all melted and the animals have been drowned or burned, the great ghost fleet of oligarchs will rule the ocean.

Yachts bigger than many tax-avoidance islands. And yachts with helipads and missile-launch systems. There is an unbridgeable chasm between Haves and Have-Yachts. She distinguishes the condition of those unfortunates for whom the world is a melancholy cage of privilege in which their every whim can be immediately satisfied from that of ordinary grafting millionaires and multi-millionaires. She has a special interest in, and admitted fetish for, the strategies, properties and appurtenances of the very rich. * The loudest crimes are hidden in plain sight. In Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, she describes the overweening spike of Renzo Piano’s Shard as ‘a glass and concrete arrangement of the Qatar sovereign wealth fund’. T he London architecture you are permitted to notice, Caroline Knowles reckons, is just money on display.

Plutocracy steam