Michael Lewis bursts onto the screen with smiles and hellos – bubbly, friendly, with a passionate, infectious enthusiasm that seeps out on the page, but is even more palpable in person (well, by video call).

He gushes about London, how much it has changed since the seven-year period in the 1980s when he studied at the London School of Economics and then sold bonds at Salomon Brothers’ UK headquarters.

“I got to a point where I actually had to make a conscious decision to come back,” he says from his home in Berkeley, California. “I sensed, ‘I'm just gonna stay here’ — I liked it so much.” He misses the theatre, the literary and journalism scene and the stickiness of his foreign friendships. “Once you have an English friend, you can't lose the English friend.”