A short interview in which Francis Spufford, author of The Child that Books Built and Backroom Boys, discusses his latest book, Red Plenty: “Strange as it may seem, the grey, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairytale. It was built on the 20th-century magic called ‘the planned economy’, which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working…”