There is already a growing pile of books about the 2008 financial crisis, the biggest catastrophe to hit the banking world since the Wall Street crash. My favourites so far have been Michael Lewis's The Big Short,  a brilliant account of the traders who saw the storm coming, and Matt Taibbi's Griftopia, for sheer shock and entertainment.  But with Too Big To Fail  the New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin may have given us the definitive history that historians will turn to in years to come.

Sorkin's book is in the grand tradition of American reportage. He documents in the most meticulous fashion every twist and turn that led to that manic week in September when no bank – not even Goldman Sachs – seemed safe and every day threatened to tip us into the financial abyss.

But he also has a fine eye for the colourful detail which brings the whole story alive – Hank Paulson throwing up in the Treasury wastepaper bin as the tension gets to him, then-New York Fed chief Tim Geithner running through Manhattan streets at 6 a.m, trying to clear his mind before another day of financial fire fighting.

And the portraits of the self-regarding titans of Wall Street are fabulous. Lehman's Dick Fuld, an intimidating presence who had earned his spurs as a single-minded trader, beginning to fall apart as his bank slides towards the precipice.  Jamie Dimon of Morgan Stanley losing his cool during talks with the crumbling insurance giant AIG: “This is amateurish, it's pathetic…. you guys need to get a handle on the numbers.”

And British readers will particularly enjoy this portrait of the Barclays CEO John Varley: “…soft spoken and courteous,  he wore suspenders every day.” (NB for American readers: suspenders in British English hold up ladies' stockings rather than men's trousers.)
 
These corporate moguls had been cocooned in a private world, where flying commercial rather than climbing aboard the private jet was seen as an unimaginable hardship. Now they were being dragged blinking into the light,  summoned to the New York Federal Reserve and to Washington as the crisis engulfed them.

On the other side of the table, the regulators – Paulson, Ben Bernanke,  Geithner – are painted more sympathetically, as well-meaning but increasingly helpless lifeboatmen, struggling to keep the banks afloat, while ducking the brickbats from Capitol Hill.

So how did it happen? Sorkin is perhaps better at reportage than analysis – he seems to have been hiding under the table at every crucial meeting. But one quote from the Bank Of England Governor Mervyn King at a bankers' dinner at the US Treasury seems particularly apt: “You are all bright people but you failed,”he tells them. “So the lesson is we can't let you get as big as you were, and do the damage that you've done or get as complex as you were.”

And that was six months before the fall of Lehmans. The bright people had plenty more failures ahead of them.

Rory Cellan-Jones can be found on Twitter as @ruskin147