Across four hundred pages of wit, cynicism and dark humour, two lines in Rachel Maddow’s second book, Blowout, stand out. They just so happen to be on the same page. As Maddow, an Emmy Award-winning MSNBC host, outlines the curse that has seen corruption and poor governance blight developing countries endowed with resource wealth, she quotes the former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani: ‘All in all … I wish we’d discovered water.’ The founder of OPEC, Venezuelan diplomat Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, is more direct: ‘Oil is the excrement of the devil.’

Such sentiments give a flavour of the tone of this rollicking examination of Big Energy’s impact on the world. Maddow notes, by way of example, that as Equatorial Guinea’s annual oil revenue grew from $2.1 million to $3.9 billion over the course of fifteen years, the infant mortality rate