‘It has been a little bit of a lonely effort.’ Ashoka Mody, an economics professor at Princeton University, and the former deputy director of the International Monetary Fund’s European department, is talking about EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts, his brilliant, magisterial history of the EU and the development of the Eurozone. ‘The vast majority of the European establishment’, Mody continues, ‘has either tried to ignore or to contest what it seems to me are very basic economic principles and facts’.

One can see why the European establishment might be inclined to do so. EuroTragedy is an indictment of the whole postwar European project, a meticulous, excoriating takedown of that which the European establishment holds dear. And it is also an attack on the European establishment…