Books 32 and 33 of 2025. Prebble’s play, Enron, managed to capture the personalities behind the funny economics that underpinned its downfall and the credit crunch years later. Ben Okri’s poetry collection had an amazing poem on the Grenfell Tower Fire.
But it made the tower look pretty, yes it made the tower look pretty. But in
twenty-four storeys, not a single sprinkler.
In twenty-four storeys not a single alarm that worked. In
twenty-four storeys not a single fire escape,
Only a single stairwell designed in hell, waiting For an
inferno. That’s the story of our times.
Make it pretty on the outside, but a death trap On the
inside. Make the hollow sound nice, make The empty
look nice. That’s all they will see,
How it looks, how it sounds, not how it really is, unseen. But if
you really look you can see it, if you really listen You can hear
it. You’ve got to look beneath the cladding. There’s cladding
everywhere. Political cladding,
Economic cladding, intellectual cladding—things that look good But
have no centre, have no heart, only moral padding.