On Brexit films, Brexit books and Brexit television

I RECENTLY spent a happy few days in Los Angeles promoting my new book, “Capitalism in America: A History” (co-written with Alan Greenspan). I was driving down Hollywood Boulevard in a taxi thinking that all was right with the world—the sun was shining, the people were good-looking and, above all, I wasn’t on deadline to write something about Brexit—when I caught sight of a giant red billboard bearing a single word in huge letters: BREXIT.

Worried that I’d finally gone mad—and it can only be a matter of time given both the pace and content of political news in Britain—I asked my taxi driver if I was seeing things. He assured me that the sign was in fact there and that it was advertising the new Benedict Cumberbatch film which was called “An Uncivil War” but is simply being called “Brexit” in the United States. I asked him what Brexit meant to him—interviewing taxi drivers is what foreign correspondents call “research”—and he gave me a remarkably well-informed summary of the whole sad tale. Few lobby correspondents could have done better.