It may be good enough for Jane Austen, but how much is it worth?

All the recent excitement on the world's stock exchanges - last week the cost of renovating the Underground was wiped off the value of shares in half a day - puts one in mind of the question of true value and what it really is. Back in the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon thought that money was the token of value in the same way as words were the tokens of ideas. Three hundred years later, Auden too plumped for money with the Night Mail crossing the border bringing the cheque ...