John Mills asks why the intellectual ideals behind the EU have still not led to a viable European monetary union

MONETARY Union in Crisis is a timely reminder that many of the problems which the European Union faces are even more deep-seated that the current rows over the EU’s Constitution and its budget.
Why have the EU economies performed so poorly over the last 30 years, reversing the dynamism which was so widely evident for the first quarter century after World War II?
Why is unemployment so high, the EU so little loved, and its electorate so disaffected?
Monetary Union in Crisis traces the history of the EU’s monetary policy intellectual development and analyses what went wrong. The success of the Bundesbank in keeping inflation in Germany down and the Deutsche Mark competitive appeared to provide a lodestone for a Europe wide economic policy. Unfortunately, it was not so simple.

Do you know what a fopdoodle is? Or a dandiprat or a ponk? Dr Samuel Johnson did, and put the words in the first ever dictionary, writes Gerald Isaaman

HE signed the contract over breakfast at the Golden Anchor pub, near Holborn Bar, on June 18, 1746, accepting payment, in instalments, of 1,500 guineas, equivalent perhaps today of a colossal £150,000.
And for that extraordinary sum Dr Samuel Johnson, unknown, yet witty, erudite and, by his own account, a “disgracefully lazy” Grub Street hack, agreed to spend the next three years providing England with a dictionary of its own, to rival those already acclaimed in France and Italy.
That was his first mistake. He ended up taking eight years on the project, carried out in the garret rooms of a house in Gough Square, off Fleet Street, where he was aided by six mostly Scottish helpers digging out thousands of quotations to illustrate the words.
And the plan he proposed for the task – the one that brought in the investors under the inspired leadership of printer Robert Dodsley – proved virtually worthless as he put together a dictionary of 42,773 entries that was finally published 250 years ago on April 15, 1755.