Spear's Wealth Management Survey

Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour

Kyle Bass, a Texas-based hedge-fund manager who did well out of shorting the sub-prime property market before the 2008 financial crisis, used to play the international strategy board game Risk as a kid, which led him to find out everything about a tiny country called Iceland, which was a key strategic location in the game

The Gentry: Stories of the English

How delicious the notion of the gentry is. How beautifully it shades into every kind of 19th-century fraudulence, into Eric Hobsbawm’s Invention of Tradition. How easily it locks on to the much later and altogether more middle-class idea of the gentleman

Zahawi and Hancock on 'Masters of Nothing'

The Wide Blue Yonder

A new breed of Tory MPs emerged from the 2010 general election, and already some are making their mark. Anne McElvoy looks at two of Cameron’s cabal

Sir Donald Hawley's Library 

Josh Spero turns the beautifully-illustrated pages of Sir Donald Hawley’s library, a compendium of Western books on Eastern experiences for sale

Hisham Matar on Gaddafi, the Libyan Revolution and His Father's Abduction

Matar of Life and Death

Hisham Matar’s first novel had huge political resonance in Libya, but both that and his recent second work are personal, human tales at heart, he tells Sophie McBain

The Wizard of Lies

A Ponzi scheme ‘is the crime of the egotist, not the sadist’, writes Diana B Henriques. Whereas others have depicted Bernie Madoff as a psychopath, in her estimation he was not a dastardly villain intent on causing pain to others. 

Last Call

To most people on this side of the Atlantic, the self-denying ordinance known as Prohibition is a mystery. How did it come about that for fourteen years immediately after the First World War, the most powerful nation on the earth (and, practically speaking, the inventor of the cocktail) put itself in the position of refusing its citizens the right to purchase and to consume alcoholic beverages?

A Tribute to Graham Greene

Sunday, 2 October 2011
Part of the Henley Literary Festival

The End of the Affair was one of Graham Greene's greatest novels and was published 60 years ago in September. Its personal content has made it a novel of endless speculation by both writers and academics

Who Runs Britain?

Sunday, 18 September 2011
Part of the Woodstock Literary Festival

As the city, big business and the media become ever more closely tied to the nexus of power in Downing Street, commentators believe that a succession of democratically elected governments has been seduced by rich individuals, oligopolies and media owners to the benefit of the few

The Master Switch

The title of Tim Wu’s book is taken from a remark by a former president of CBS News, Fred Friendly, who said that freedom of speech depends on ‘who controls the master switch’. In the United States, it is not the Constitution, Wu argues, but ‘the industrial structure that [has] determined the limits of free speech’.