Prime Minister Burnham’s brush with investors in gilts was short and sour. He argued that Britain needed to stop being ‘in hock to the bond markets’. The gilt market duly responded and yields began to rise before he quickly engaged reverse gear and confirmed his support for Rachel Reeves’s fiscal framework.

It puts one in mind of James Carville’s clumsy bon mot about wanting to be reincarnated as the bond market so as to be able to terrify everyone. In A Fabulous Debt, Robin Wigglesworth runs Carville round the course again, but fortunately he has many more interesting things to say besides that. He is the Financial Times’s Alphaville editor, based in Norway. Alphaville is the geeky markets section of the paper, of interest mainly to those who buy and sell financial instruments for a living.

He has chosen to step back from fielding breathless calls from Goldman Sachs traders to review the way governments have funded themselves over the last nine hundred years, beginning in 12th-century Venice, and attempts to explain why the markets in government debt now exert such a powerful influence on the