Michael Lewis is in a class of his own. Not in the sense that he is uniquely gifted (though Tom Wolfe says he’s ‘probably the best current writer in America’), but in the sense that the launch of another of his forays into the financial jungle is an event to compare with, in her day, J K Rowling’s delivery of another volume of Harry Potter. The question is not whether the new book is better than anything else in its sector this season, but whether it maintains the mould-breaking standard set by its own author.

In Lewis’s case the benchmark was Liar’s Poker, his hilarious 1989 account of his career as a bond salesman with the Wall Street firm of Salomon Brothers in New York and London. It was wickedly observant and, together with Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, it crystallised the popular collective