April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. And so on. What Thomas Stearnes Eliot didn’t tell us about the human condition in his magisterial, funereal The Wasteland is virtually not worth knowing. However brilliant Eliot was (and, believe me, he was) even he lacked the power of premonition. Even though he was writing on the eve of the most poignant reminder of the evil that men do, WW1, he couldn’t have envisaged the destruction of the financial world that gripped the earth in the 1930s. He was, of course, long gone by the time Lehman went to the wall last September. But he’s worth recalling, particularly as talk of…