Keith Hart was an exceptional thinker, never shy to express an opinion, not least about the economy or what others had to say about it, alternately critical and nurturant, but not without self-irony after the fact. Keith was always ahead of himself, bursting with new ideas. In 2002 he circulated to some of his many interlocutors a well-developed sketch for a novel he was planning. I don’t know whether it ever got written but it had the makings of a blockbuster.

Charting the economic upheavals of recent decades through the career of his romantic protagonist, the plot certainly resonates with the world today. Entitled Futures: The New Don Quixote, the book traces current obsessions with the future, as expressed in betting, money markets, interest in life after death, utopias, and Armageddons.

The plot follows the life and afterlife of Don Quick, named for the Australian superstar cricketer, Donald Bradman. He is born in Manchester, trains at Cambridge, and finances his education by betting. But instead of becoming an anthropologist, Don Quick forms a hedge fund and makes a fortune. Eventually he grows disgusted with the markets and turns himself into a kind of philanthropist, in the image of George Soros. In Keith’s own words, “he is Kant on speed with a lot of money,” a peripatetic public figure engaging in debates with all the other prophets of the age—from economists and philosophers to Indian gurus and televangelists.

The plot has many further twists and turns, including Quick’s mysterious death beneath the statue of Rousseau at the spot where the Rhone begins its journey from Lake Geneva. Evidently, there are parallels both to Keith’s actual life and to an imagined alter ego. Keith did see himself as a kind of under-recognized prophet with a lot to say, but perhaps his more modest side wondered whether he wasn’t also tilting at windmills.