The Bank never liked them. Exchange controls were a wartime necessity which carried over into peace, leaving a Home Guard poster to adorn the office: "Freedom is in peril. Defend it with your might." When the Bank revived the idea of rationing money by price, Fforde — it was his project — told me: "Yes, we believe in markets here. It sometimes surprises us that people in markets don't." He was ahead of his time. 

In the end, and at the point of the International Monetary Fund's pistol, the policymakers conceded that money mattered, and the Bank was set to monitor its supply. "Sterling M3", or broad money, was now the key indicator. Even then, Charles Goodhart, the Bank's resident sage, warned that if you hung the whole weight of policy on one peg, it would come out of the wall. So it did. When, decades later, policy was hung on a particular measure of inflation, it happened again.

The lean years saw the Bank at its best in practice rather than theory. It fought a professional rearguard action for sterling. Roy Bridge, in command, likened his tactics to sex: "Dissertations tend to stimulate unduly the imaginations of those less experienced in the subject." (He meant the Treasury.) It welcomed foreign banks and restored London's primacy as an international financial centre. It coped with a crisis which saw 50 banks or quasi-banks at risk. Gordon Richardson as Governor enlisted the chairmen of the High Street banks to crew his lifeboat: "Gentlemen, I am not appealing to altruism."

That chilling injunction finds no place in Capie's pages — 98 more than Fforde's — which are stronger on paperwork than drama. The Bank's archives are full of "notes for the file", which are cited at length, but their authors, naturally tended to write in Bankese, and the habit is catching. So Capie's readers can find themselves expected to puzzle the story out, as Fforde's were. Perhaps, like the six-volume life of Disraeli, this work will come to be recognised as a quarry and a classic.

How will history judge today's Bank? Shorn of many of its duties, set to focus on monetary policy and an index that bore out Goodhart's Law, it suddenly needed to be more of a bank and less of a study group. Not that its historian will exactly say so.