From Canadian farmer's boy J K Galbraith to grocer's daughter Margaret Thatcher, Graeme Bedell presents a lightning study of the titans who strode the politico- economic stage in the West over the past 200 years. We move from Adam Smith and David Ricardo to Marx, Keynes and Beveridge, finally reaching the monetarist policies of Milton Friedman that found sharp expression in recent Tory governments. It was Professor Phillips and his famous curve models that paved the way for Thatcherite 'kill or cure' policies when she cleansed the Augean stables of 1970s Britain; then came the boom and bust cycles we are so familiar with today under New Labour.In a work packed with facts and referenced quotations, the voices of the great are cut with personal observations by the author, a former Politics teacher, who recalls the social and political style of each era using cues from film, song and television to remind us just how it was. This spiced-up textbook is an invaluable guide to economics for the student, the businessman or the consumer in the street.