John Rapley

John Rapley has made a vocation of working, and living, at the frontier where theory meets practice.

After beginning his career at Oxford University's International Development Centre, he left for the developing world, where he spent two decades working as an academic, journalist and ultimately the co-creator and director of a policy think tank. Along the way, he lectured at universities in Britain, the US, Canada, France, Germany, South Africa and the Caribbean. He last taught in Cambridge's Centre of Development Studies, and now devotes himself fully to his writing. In amidst lecture-series and fellowships abroad, he divides his time between New York and London.

His most recent books are Twilight of the Money Gods: Economics as a Religion and How it all Went Wrong (Simon & Schuster, 2017) and, with Peter Heather, The Lives of Empires (Penguin, forthcoming 2019).