World-famous author Sylvia Nasar will have a remarkable new book on store shelves next week. Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius is a collection of stories about the field’s top theorists and practitioners, dating back to Charles Dickens whose classic A Christmas Carol is neatly portrayed as a work of economics.

Not content to present miniature biographies of Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich von Hayek and the rest, Nasar tells their stories in context. So we’re treated to chapters devoted to Keynes at Bretton Woods, [Irving] Fisher and the Money Illusion and Engels and Marx in the Age of Miracles. This suggests a near-superhuman dedication to research, and for that alone the book deserves credit.

Grand Pursuit is packed with fascinating, often surprising details about the lives and times of the great men and women it covers. Here are five favourites:

• Marx nearly blew his assignment to co-write The Communist Manifesto. “At the end of his month-long stay in London, Marx had returned to his suburban villa in Brussels, where he promptly put off the task of writing the final version and threw himself into a lecture series … on the economics of exploitation,” writes Nasar. “In January, after league officials threatened to hand the assignment to someone else, he finally picked up his pen.”

• The term unemployment was first heard in a debate about wages, and whether they were on the rise or decline. This was in the midst of a punishing recession that followed a financial panic in 1893.

• Egypt was the China of the early 20^th century. Nasar reports that between 1904 and 1907, the value of Egyptian stocks grew by five times. She quotes a speech delivered to the Liberal Party club in London by Evelyn Baring: “History, so far as I am aware, records no other instance of so sudden a leap from poverty and misery to affluence and material well-being as that which has taken place in Egypt.”

• The London School of Economics was co-founded by a self-described socialist. Beatrice Potter, who opened the institution with her husband Sidney Webb, was a great influence on Winston Churchill and countless other leaders in the early decades of the 20^th century. “No one has a greater claim to the invention of the idea of a government safety net,” writes Nasar.

• Keynes was “rather homely and quite rude.” Who knew?

Much of what we understand about economics today comes from the figures Nasar writes about. Stories like these help colour our sense of the real people behind the very big ideas. I found some of the personal details a bit gossipy – Beatrice Potter’s love life was of less interest to me than it was Nasar, apparently – but on the whole, all of this background contributes to a fuller understanding of how the fundamentals of economic theory evolved.

Grand Pursuit is an impressive accomplishment. It may not garner the Hollywood attention that Nasar’s bestseller A Beautiful Mind won. But it is, as they say, an important book. It’s also marvelously entertaining.