"The European Union and International Monetary Fund negotiators who sit in authority in Athens in 2012 have many antecedents," begins Pettifer. It's an unconvincing start as Athens in 2012, so far, has produced more chaos than authority and those responsible for this are primarily Greek politicians. Pettifer continues: "Men and women completely ignorant of the Greek language have played their parts in the making of modern Greece, with varying degrees of success." To suggest that the EU/IMF negotiators, whatever their nationalities and native languages, do not have access to Greek-speaking support staff is incredible.

Pettifer can be sharp. He notes: "The Euro currency 'project' did not originate in Greece. As Victor Hugo observed in 1855, the notion of a single European currency, like all bad ideas, has been around for a very long time." And he crafts some colourful images: "Yes this crisis did not drop from the sky as an eagle in Epirus might drop a sick lamb." But he cancels this out with truly baffling sentences like this: "The wish to reject the American Exceptionalism of the Bush period has meant an often uncritical adherence to frequently superficially understood multilateralist ideas in international relations and abandonment of some aspects of US legitimate claims to world leadership."

He correctly identifies the decision by Greece to host the 2004 Olympic Games as pivotal in the country's loss of fiscal reason, but he undermines the argument with ideological point scoring such as, "...it appealed to the American corporations whose major players connected with big sport, like Nike and Coca Cola, had become sponsors and advertisers with all recent stagings of the Olympic Games. The Olympics embodied the culture of health, anti-smoking campaigning, intense and unbridled Darwinian competition and many other neo-conservative social objectives."

While politics are personal, facts are not and more careful editing would have prevented 17 becoming 27 here: "The euro project was doomed because it was impossible to chain together twenty-seven different economies into one currency and one central financial institution without any tax revenue raising capacity." One wonders, too, where the editor was when this drifted by:

"When I first went to little hilltop Exohorio in about 1983, very old ladies sung songs and wove on looms in their houses that had changed little since Homeric times. Now on nearby beaches you are as likely to hear the programmed chit-chat of Whitehall civil servants from London or Zehlendorf doctors from Berlin, and where the loom once stood is an ugly chrome exercise bike in a second home. Few of these north Europeans bother to learn any Greek at all, and some like the parsimonious Dutch are notorious locally for bringing their own food from the Netherlands in their neat motor caravans."

If only the Greeks had been as parsimonious as the Dutch, James Pettifer would not be writing about the tragic crisis that has engulfed the land he so clearly loves. But Athens is not Amsterdam, and neither is it Berlin or London or Washington, as he points out repeatedly.

The Making of the Greek Crisis is short, but it would have benefitted from cutting in places. Experienced editors of e-books are scarce and the knack of fitting chapters, paragraphs and sentences to tablet and smartphone screens is being learned on the job, so James Pettifer might have profited from a kind of guidance that's not widely available yet. Still, he has made an entertaining contribution to a debate that continues to dominate the headlines.

Note I: For fans of whisky, gin, poetry, piping, fiddle playing and dance, the Islay Festival, which starts today, should be memorable.

Note II: For those who like a chilled drink without the dilution of melting ice cubes, Sipping Stones are the cool alternative.

Rachman concludes: "It is true that even a 'velvet divorce' for the eurozone would involve enormous dangers. But at least it would offer a believable exit from the present maze. As a (very) German proverb puts it — 'Better an end with horror, than a horror without end.'"

The euro was a stunningly bad idea. Now, there are no good options left. As Gideon Rachman points out in his piece, the idea that the euro could be saved by sacrificing national rule on the altar of the common currency would hollow out European democracy and invite a terrifying nationalist backlash. Let's have a civilized divorce before we have civil strife.

With its nursery-rhyme structure, the "How D'You Do" song from "The Beggar's Opera" became a favourite with London audiences because the last two lines sound like a cock crowing, something that singers emphasized during their performances:

How D'You Do

Before the barn-door crowing
The cock by hens attended,
Her eyes around him throwing,
Stands for a while suspended:
Then one he singles from the crew
And cheers the happy hen,
With how do you do and how do you do,
And how do you do again.

John Gay (1685-1732)

"The Beggar's Opera" is set in the London criminal underworld, and the idea was provided by Jonathan Swift, who suggested that the morals of the people in the infamous Newgate Prison did not differ so much from the rest of society. And if Swift were alive today, he'd feel justified in his view by contemporary events.

In "The Beggar's Opera", a receiver of stolen goods, Peachum, has a profitable business arrangement with Macheath, a highwayman. But when Peachum's daughter, Polly, falls in love with the robber, the treacherous receiver informs against Macheath, who is then imprisoned in Newgate. There, the love-struck warden's daughter, Lucy Lockit, helps him to escape and although he's recaptured in a brothel, Macheath manages to avoid the gallows. "The Beggar's Opera" was the basis for the 20th-century musical Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) by Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht. In the hands of Brecht-Weill, however, the romantic highwayman Macheath became the cruel and sinister Mackie Messer, or Mack the Knife. Marxist critiques of capitalism, even musical ones, are not known for their levity.

Meanwhile, there's this company that makes things people want to buy, and Andy Zaky makes the case for investing now: "We expect Apple to test $750 a share some time before the end of this coming January. That is roughly 50% higher than where the stock is trading today." For those who understand such things, here's his reasoning: "At $533.52 a share, Apple trades at 13x last year's earnings and at only 10.56x our expect October earnings. Those are incredibly low valuations even for Apple. At the November 25, 2011 lows, Apple traded at a 13.13 P/E ratio. So today, Apple is trading at a lower valuation than it was at the November lows. At the June 2011 lows, Apple was trading near a 15 P/E trailing P/E ratio."

Let's see what kind of numbers Facebook can deliver after the opening bell on Nasdaq today.

Next on the chopping block is the communist paper il manifesto. With daily sales down to 16,000 copies and enormous debt, the liquidators have been called in to wind up the business. Oh, and there was that little matter of €3.7 million a year in taxpayer subsidies for the ink-stained proletariat. Now that Prime Minister Mario Monti is being forced by Chancellor Angela Merkel to keep an eye on the public purse, the gravy train for the cosseted critics of capitalism has left Rome Termini for good. Talking of Teutons, like most leftist publications il manifesto was dogmatic and humourless, but it did print something amusing the day after Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope. Its front page on 20 April 2005 carried a large photo of the new Pontiff with the punning headline Il pastore Tedesco ("The German shepherd").

The technocratic rule of Mario Monti, it has to be said, has been a disaster for the likes of Il Riformista and il manifesto as it has forced ideological Italian journalists to focus on statistics, reforms, facts and more facts. This is in sharp contrast to the heady days of Silvio Berlusconi when sex, money, bunga bunga, glamour, sex, corruption, bunga bunga and more sex dominated the media agenda. That's the kind of stuff that sells newspapers, by the way. As well, the "evil" Berlusconi completely ignored those pleas from the northern side of the Alps to trim the fat, which included all those astonishing subsidies for the well-dressed disciples of Marx and Mao.

"May you get what you wish for," is said to be an ancient communist blessing. Now that their wish has been fulfilled, one can almost hear the Italian comrades weeping into their cappuccino freddo.

"There's a difference between a missed opportunity and a complete fuck-up. When Yahoo failed to capitalize on Flickr's social potential, that was a missed opportunity. But if you want to see where it completely fucked up, where it just butchered Flickr with dull knives and duller wit, turn on your phone and launch the Flickr app. Oh, what's that, you don't have one? Exactly.

Flickr had a robust mobile Web site way back in 2006 — before the iPhone even shipped. You could use it with your piece of crap Symbian phone, or the dinky screen on your Sony Ericsson T68i. But it was basically just a browser. If you wanted to get a photo from your phone to your account, you had to email it."

It may be too late in the day to fix Flickr, Honan says, and Yahoo! is probably too distracted now to take on the task because CEO Scott Thompson has just resigned after being tripped up by his academic record. Thompson had joined the company in January after previous CEO Carol Bartz was fired in September. Sadly, Yahoo! has become that kind of company.

This is a classic Catch-22 situation as Greek depositors will increasingly want to avoid their valuable euros being turned into worthless drachmas, but a bank run will only accelerate the insolvency of the Greeks banks. Still, how would you react to the crisis if you were living in Patras or Heraklion? Would you risk leaving your savings in a system that's on the verge of collapse, or would you move the money to a place where it might be safer?

Clearly, German, Dutch, British and Swiss banks can expect lots of new business. The only snag is that EU authorities are probably tracking the currency outflows and they might force the recipient banks to hand over the money pour encourager les autres, as it were, because in our networked times there's nothing to stop panicked Portuguese, Spanish or Italian depositors from doing the very same. Anecdotal evidence acquired by Rainy Day suggests that Irish people are busy moving their euros north of the Border to the safety of the sterling zone.