Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot. Call if what you like, it matters now more than ever. In The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that financial history is the back-story to all history.

From  the banking dynasty who funded the Italian Renaissance to the stock  market bubble that caused the French Revolution, this is the story of  booms and busts as it's never been told before.

With the world in  the grip of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression,  there's never been a better time to understand the ascent - and descent -  of money.

'Beautifully written ... Breathtakingly clever'  Sunday Telegraph

'A lucid and racy account of financial history'  New Statesman 

'A fine, readable and entertaining history' Dominic Sandbrook, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

  'The tales he tells of boom and bust, of triumph and disaster, of  bubbles that inflate ... are the very essence of financial history'   Bill Emmott, Financial Times

'An often enlightening and  enjoyable tour through the underside of great events, a lesson in how  the most successful great powers have always been underpinned by smart  money'  Robert Skidelsky, New York Review of Books