In 2007 – the year before his firm, Wall Street’s fourth-biggest investment bank, filed for bankruptcy – Dick Fuld paid himself $34m.

The figure is all the more startling given that, as Andrew Ross Sorkin reveals in this white-knuckle account, the vultures had already begun to circle around Fuld’s bank Lehman Brothers; most notably in the form of traders aggressively ‘short-selling’ Lehman stock – effectively betting on a continued slide in the company’s value.

That slide did continue, until the company was effectively forced into bankruptcy by US regulators on September 15.

Dubbed ‘the gorilla’ by colleagues (only half-jokingly), Fuld is just one of the key personalities sketched by Sorkin – though in many ways his pen portrait is the most compelling, portraying a hyper-intense, hubristic and finally tragic figure struggling to comprehend the enormity of the crisis he’d helped create.

Economists and historians will spend decades looking at the systemic and structural reasons for what turned out to be the biggest crash since that of 1929 – but, notwithstanding Sorkin’s enormously detailed research, his approach is not academic.

Instead this is journalism, with a nod to pot-boiler thriller-writing. Sorkin, a senior business reporter on the New York Times, claims on the sleeve of the book to have had “unprecedented access” to the key players on Wall Street. This access provided colourful titbits such as US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson’s bitter assertion that the British government had “grin-fucked” him in the heat of attempts to rescue Lehman Brothers.

He had just come off the phone with Alistair Darling, who politely informed his American counterpart that Her Majesty’s government was, in essence, refusing to allow Barclays to take over the embattled investment bank. “Little England”, Barclays’ American boss Bob Diamond texted in frustration after he found out.

At times, the level of detail Sorkin goes into verges on the bizarre – as evidence of Paulson’s disregard for social niceties, we hear that the Treasury secretary neglected to shut the toilet door on visitors to his office while he relieved himself.

All very amusing, but it illustrates a key theme of the book: that whatever the systemic, global importance of these banks, the men (and they were all men) in charge of saving them were not your average citizen.

People like Fuld, or Diamond, or indeed Paulson –  himself a former head of Goldman Sachs – had spent their professional lives maximising profits and acting ruthlessly in the marketplace.

It’s hardly a surprise that when the market broke down, these men were ill-equipped to act collectively in an effort to save capitalism from itself. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote. “They are different from you and me.”