America’s last explosion of oligarchical wealth and mass powerlessness left us some useful guidebooks to the current moment, from the top-drawer fiction of Edith Wharton and Henry James to the nasty and brutish realism of Frank Norris

The threat is private infrastructure, not all big business

In Francesca Segal’s The Innocents, the Jews of north London face the constrictions of Edith Wharton’s New York