Hugh Grant, Gabriel Byrne, Richard Chamberlain, Dennis Price, Jason Patric – what do they have in common? Answer: they’ve all impersonated Byron. If you’re a scriptwriter with a flaccid plotline in need of a little narrative Viagra, he’s the poet of choice, whether it be in The Bride of Frankenstein or an episode of Star Trek: Voyager (in which he turns up with Gandhi). And now the BBC has produced a new two-part dramatisation of his life and times, starring Jonny Lee Miller as the sex-crazed lord. Literary success came in 1812 (when he was 23) with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – about himself. It sold in huge quantities because his readers fell in love with the lonesome, melancholy, world-weary rake he claimed to be. Realising early on that his personality was his biggest asset, he kept writing about it. As his friend Samuel Rogers observed, the world and his dog went “stark mad about Childe Harold and Byron”, as they have been ever since.Will we be stark mad about the BBC’s Byron? Compared with that of Ken Russell’s Gothic and Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound, this portrait is soberly respectful of the facts – which may be just as well, given how sexed up Byron’s life was.

Should the euro rise again against the dollar this would be bad news, for exports have been the main force holding up the German economy. It is still very depressed, though it may now turn up a bit.The central issue for demand in the eurozone is the path of the euro, for domestic demand seems very flat and with rising unemployment, unlikely to perk up much. (You get this by asking companies about their ordering expectations for raw materials and intermediate supplies.) It gives some indication of the outlook for GDP, though it has tended to be over-optimistic this cycle. In the very last couple of weeks, there seems to be a slightly better tone in the forward-looking surveys, one of which, the composite purchasing managers’ index, is shown in the next graph. I cannot find a single official forecast that got close to suggesting that the eurozone economy might dip into recession. That might help offset the impact on growth of consumers pulling back, but it would be bad news for continental Europe.The eurozone’s performance this year has taken officialdom by surprise. HSBC predicts that the current account deficit could rise to 6 per cent of GDP, which, if true, would surely lead to further dollar weakness.

There are, of course, other imbalances in the US economy, including the current account and Federal deficits. There is no doubt that this autumn will see a bounce, for this is happening now. But that could peter our next year – not going back into recession but just being rather disappointing. It looks at hours worked rather than numbers in jobs because that is a finer measure of the demand for labour. As you can see, the dip in output was less serious than the early 1990s downturn, but the dip in hours worked has been more savage And it is still falling.So it is a different recovery. So there has been a surge in productivity, which ultimately should feed through into profits, but there has not been a surge in consumer revenues. People have kept spending but have had to dip into savings (or more likely increase borrowings) to do so.You can see this in the first chart.

Yes, the economy is expanding, albeit at a slightly slower rate than in previous cycles, but the really new thing is that companies are not hiring. As far as the US is concerned, the most interesting thing is the jobless nature of the recovery. The apparent surge in growth in the UK, which if the National Institute is right, is running at an annual rate of more than 3 per cent, suggests that we may be first to go up.Try this. The talk has shifted to the timing of the next interest rate rise and the global sequence of moves. As for the UK, we have pulled through the cycle better than anyone else – not quite what was expected.Now some of us may have done rather better than others in guessing how the world economy would perform – this column has been right to focus on the eurozone’s weakness – but no one got the outcome right.So what, given this underwhelming performance, can we sensibly say now? It is a good time to ask because there has been an undoubted improvement in sentiment in the last couple of weeks, particularly about the US and UK economies – as reflected in rising share prices.