Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves and her husband, senior civil servant Nick Joicey, once spent the evening of Valentine’s Day watching a Newsnight special about the lessons from the Swedish banking crisis.
Reeves recalls that nerdy night on the sofa in the introduction to what turns out to be a much more personal book than its title suggests. Woven through her crisp pen portraits of pioneering female economists, many of whose contributions were never fully recognised in their lifetimes, is another narrative – about Reeves’s intellectual hinterland and how it might shape a Labour government.
