The world leaders who have been caught out napping by the current crisis, or who have had to postpone their holidays, like Spain’s Zapatero, or who have had to manage the crisis from their holiday hiding holes, like Britain’s Cameron or Germany’s Merkel – all show a very poor appreciation of history.

For despite all the appearances, August seems to be the preferred time for bad things to happen.

At dusk in early August 1914 Sir Edward Grey, on the eve of the first world war, pronounced the famous and ominous words: “The lights are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our time.”

Twenty-five years later, in August 1939, Europe was once again hurtling towards war. On 23 August, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was announced to a shocked world – making the invasion of Poland and a general war inevitable. On the night of 31 August, Adolf Hitler ordered the German army to attack Poland.

The tendency for international crises to break out in August has persisted into the modern age. The Prague spring in Czechoslovakia was crushed when the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded in August 1968.

In August 1989, the first breach in the Iron Curtain was made when Hungary opened its borders to Austria, starting off the train of events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall a few months later.

In August 1990, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait – and within weeks President Bush was rallying a coalition to wage the first Gulf war.

A year later, in August 1991, Mr Bush was informed that a coup was under way in the Soviet Union – and that Mikhail Gorbachev had been arrested. Within days, the Soviet Union begun to break up.

In August 2008, when Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary at the time, had to deal with the crisis on a mobile phone from a holiday villa in Spain.

Speculation against the pound forced Britain out of the exchange rate mechanism in September 1992; and the Thai baht collapsed in August 1997, setting the stage for the subsequent Asian financial crisis.

The first sign of current crisis came via an injection of liquidity from the European Central Bank in August 2007. The collapse of Lehman Brothers did not follow until September 2008.

One would think that perhaps something similar can be said of the other months, but when one looks closely one realises this is simply not true. There’s something about August…