For much of the past 40 years, Professor Robert Skidelsky has devoted his life to one man: John Maynard Keynes, the economist, civil servant, speculator and co-architect of the postwar Bretton Woods monetary system. Occasionally, he might have wondered where his dedication was leading him. Not now. The global financial crisis has tested to destruction the belief in rational expectations and efficient markets, and Keynes, the arch-pragmatist, is enjoying an Indian summer.

We are meeting at Rules, a venerable English restaurant (est 1798) in Covent Garden, London. With its period cartoons and elegant portraits, Rules seems the type of place that Keynes might have frequented in his heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. Sadly, the world’s authority cannot confirm my hunch.