Dambisa Moyo is elegant, articulate and cool-headed – a match for the sharpest TV host. She is hyperactive as well – the air miles she has collected in four months promoting her controversial book Dead Aid would fly her around the world again.

She is also black and Zambian and has adopted an uncompromising opposition to foreign aid, the root, she is convinced, of many of Africa’s evils. She is not the first economist to question received wisdom about the need for official development assistance in Africa. But she is the first to popularise such a polemical version of the anti-aid theory and to have spread her message so far so fast.