Harold James, a professor at Princeton University, is a very distinguished economist and economic historian. He has in the past written a thoughtful book about the Bank of England, which demonstrated an insider’s understanding of economic and financial policymaking on both sides of the Atlantic. That is quite a rare achievement.

In Seven Crashes he tries something more challenging than institutional history. One might describe it as ‘financial crisis porn’. For those who get their excitement from stories of excess and folly, there is enough material here for a summer of thrills. We move from the ‘The Great Famine and the Great Revolt’ of the 1840s, through the hyperinflation after the First World War to the Great Depression of the 1930s that followed the Wall Street Crash. James then moves on to the inflation of the 1970s, before tackling the financial crisis of 2007–9 in all its gory details and ending with an examination of the economic consequences of the Covid lockdowns. There is no mention of Partygate, oddly, but there is an exciting chart showing the evolution of the ten-year Treasury bond yield. Economists can sometimes miss the bigger picture.

To meander through these episodes with James as one’s guide and mentor is always illuminating, and he peppers his analysis with fascinating details and anecdotes. It is fun to recall the Hunt family’s attempt to corner the silver market in the late 1970s, the story of Tiny Rowland