When I tried to market a “popular book on economics” to publishers a few years ago, it was a hard sell. They thought such a book was an oxymoron. Economics was perhaps worthy, certainly boring. Economists, they thought, were people who talked about whether interest rates would go up or down even though they did not know.

Television producers, desperate to make the subject visual, made presenters stand dejectedly in the rain outside the Bank of England. Not for nothing did Thomas Carlyle label the subject the dismal science. In vain did I argue that the people who bought works by Simon Schama and Richard Dawkins would also buy books on economics if the subject were presented in the right way.