The weird, wild story of humanity’s obsession with gold A new book charts the gilded history of an ancient asset May 14th 2026 In the 1980s Lloyd Blankfein, the future boss of Goldman Sachs but then a rookie gold trader, bought a kilogram of the metal for himself. He describes this in “Streetwise”, his memoir, as less an investment than a conversation piece—albeit one that cost around $15,000 ($50,000 today). When he handed it round at dinner parties, he found it better at prompting awe than speech. “People would become slightly mesmerised,” he writes. “No one ever wanted to let go of it.” As Dominic Frisby, a financial writer, recounts, gold has captivated human beings since time immemorial. In doing so, it has shaped the course of history. The earliest known artefacts made of it are 6,700 years old, from the
Neolithic period, and include crowns, brooches and a “gold phallus cover, with holes for threads to tie it on”. Even then, in other words, gold was already bound up with wealth and power—as it still is today. (The phallus cover, Mr Frisby muses, perhaps indicated “the owner’s status as a leading procreator”.) The “primal instinct” to covet gold pervades folklore. Greek myths heave with the stuff: there is a golden fleece (sought by the Argonauts), a golden apple (given to Aphrodite) and golden everything (touched by King Midas). Ancient rulers understood the power of this symbolism and put it to good use. When the Lydian empire struck the first coins in the seventh century BC, it made them from silver and gold. Some 200 years later, when Alexander the Great conquered the Persian empire, he carefully secured all its main gold-supplying regions. He then established 26 mints across Europe, Asia and Africa, and ensured that some of the most valuable coins had a gold purity of 98%. This idea stuck, on and off, for over 2,000 years—and so gold’s history is also that of money. It is therefore unfortunate that Mr Frisby’s grasp of this topic is shaky. He writes reverently of the gold standard, under which governments used to peg their currencies’ value to the metal and for which no serious economist would advocate today. Its well-documented contributions to deflationary and financial crises, including the Depression, go curiously undiscussed in this book. By contrast the author blasts the “pernicious consequences” of the “floating fiat currencies” that replaced gold-backed ones after America junked the international gold standard in 1971. In fact, this switch set the stage for a great economic boom. Part of the fun of this book is how much Mr Frisby embodies the stereotype of the goldbug as a crank. “Without the discipline of gold,” he writes, governments have grown “fat on waste, war and welfare”, as if these problems were born in the 1970s. Currencies not backed by gold are blamed for rising house prices, immigration and “feelings of hopelessness”. “The connections,” Mr Frisby darkly warns, “are undeniable once you understand the forces at work.” This reviewer must confess to having finished the book unenlightened.
It is nevertheless worth reading, because the author has collected some cracking stories. There is the Spanish King Ferdinand II’s order to the conquistadors to “Get gold, humanely, if possible, but at all hazards, get gold.” There are the gold rushes of the 19th century, which transformed California and Australia. There is the Bank of Norway’s daring—and amazingly successful—mission to keep its gold from the Nazis during the second world war. It is also worth reading this book because gold still matters a lot. It accounts for over 80% of America’s foreign-exchange reserves. Meanwhile America’s weaponisation of the dollar, through sanctions on the likes of Russia and Iran, has prompted a race for alternatives, whether backed by governments or based on bitcoin. Yet as Mr Frisby notes, even the countries that are keenest on these alternatives, such as China, Saudi Arabia and Thailand, are clamouring to buy gold, too. So are investors, because of gold’s use as a haven from inflation and political chaos. Both have surged in recent years, as has the gold price: Mr Blankfein’s kilogram would now fetch around $150,000. As a basis for money gold is still, as John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1924, “a barbarous relic”. But as a component in investors’ portfolios, it is as important as ever. ■ For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//culture/2026/05/14/the-weird-wild-story-of-humanitys- obsession-with-gold
Jan Morris was a man, then a trans woman—but always a narcissist A new biography digs into the life of an intrepid journalist May 14th 2026 In July 1972 the man once known as “James Morris” walked into a clinic in Casablanca. Days later, after a brisk operation, Jan Morris walked out. “I really am me!” She felt instantly different. As a man her role had been to “push and initiate”; now it was to “yield and accept”. She felt closer to animals. She found herself “talking to the garden flowers, wishing them a Happy Easter”. Women are like that. You can barely move in London parks for women talking to flowers. Not all women were so nice. Some, when they read “Conundrum” (1974), Morris’s account of her transition, did not smile at flowers and think pretty, yielding thoughts. Instead they said some pretty unyielding things. Morris is
“to me a man who has eaten a great many pills”, wrote Germaine Greer, an Australian feminist. Morris was “a man’s idea of a woman”, said Rebecca West, a British critic. Though not wholly a man’s idea of a woman. When it came to domestic labour, Morris’s daughter observed, “she did nothing.” All lives are complicated. The life of Jan Morris—soldier, journalist, writer, man, woman, father, mother—is more complicated than most, as a new biography by Sara Wheeler, a travel writer, shows. (Her pronouns can feel complex too: this review, like the book, refers to Morris as “he” pre- transition.) Morris lived an “insanely interesting life”, witnessing the second world war, the conquest of Everest, the end of British rule in Palestine. “She was,” Ms Wheeler writes, “the 20th century”. Certainly, after he became world-famous for covering the first conquest of Everest as a journalist for the Times, Morris met many of its most interesting players. Harry Truman chatted to him; Walt Disney spoke with him about his cartoons. Time erodes all lives, however great, into a few “Ozymandias”-like fragments: Napoleon is Waterloo and Elba; Caesar is the Rubicon, Cleopatra and his assassination; lesser lives are littler yet. Morris—who had been “James of Everest”—became the man who, in 1972, had had an operation and started dressing, says Ms Wheeler, like “a Walmart version of the Queen”. She was, as another trans woman said of herself, “a sex change first and anything else second”. But Morris did so much. When he was born, in 1926, the British Empire lay over the map in “huge red slabs”—and empire coloured his life, too. His wife, Elizabeth, was brought up in it (she lived in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, with a pet baby elephant); Morris’s job was “to help dissolve” it (he was sent to Palestine as an intelligence officer by the War Office); later, he chronicled it (in his “Pax” trilogy). His big break came when he was sent by the Times to cover the Everest expedition (much to the irritation of the leader, John Hunt, who considered Morris “physically substandard”). The expedition was such hot news that its results had to be telegrammed in codewords: the death of a climber was to be “SIGNALBOX”; success was “SNOW CONDITIONS BAD”. On May 30th 1953 Morris sat, dizzy with altitude in his tent, and typed: “SNOW CONDITIONS BAD STOP”.
The ascent of Morris’s career had begun. His family life was now thriving (he and Elizabeth eventually had five children), but Morris was struggling. At four he knew he “had been born into the wrong body”. And so he began his transition in his early 30s. The description of this change is interesting— but far more interesting is Morris’s unchanging narcissism. When their baby daughter died of meningitis, Morris was not at the hospital: he had refused to go. Morris may have talked to flowers, but paused to consider few other living things. Particularly not Elizabeth, who kept house, kept quiet over the gender transition and endured. As this detailed (at times far too detailed) biography shows, her transition would, in the end, eclipse all else. “I want to be remembered as Jan ‘Empire’ Morris” she said. But she noted, “the headlines will read, ‘Sex Change Author Dies’.” Many, Ms Wheeler notes, “more or less did”. Few people today read her works. The sun is setting on Empire Morris. ■ For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//culture/2026/05/14/jan-morris-was-a-man-then-a-trans- woman-but-always-a-narcissist
“Companion podcasts” are the latest hit format Ready for more after bingeing on TV? May 14th 2026 When you are not watching your new favourite TV show, you may be thinking about it. How did they come up with that plotline—and how did the lead actor feel when he read the script? Where did they shoot that memorable scene, and with how many retakes? How long did it take to make that bejewelled costume? A new format has emerged to satisfy fans’ curiosity: the companion podcast. Recently listeners have devoured episodes about “Beef”, a mini-series, and plunged into “The Pitt”, a medical drama. This month, ahead of its tv remake of “Harry Potter” in December, HBO is releasing a podcast revisiting the eight movies. And on May 15th viewers will return to Rutshire for the second season of “Rivals”, an adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster