Spear's Wealth Management Survey

Spear's Book Awards 2009: Vote Here

Vote here for your novel of the year in the Spear's Book Awards. Your vote counts!

Spear's Book Awards 2009 Shortlist Announced

Click here to view the full shortlist for the inaugural Spear's Book Awards, to be held on June 30th at the Langham, London

Caroline Michel

To celebrate the Spear's Book Awards on June 30th, Caroline Michel, one of the country's top literary agents and CEO of the PFD agency, has written the Spear's Diary for the forthcoming summer issue.

Spear's Book Awards Longlist

Click here to view the full longlist for the inaugural Spear's Book Awards, to be held on June 30th at the Langham hotel, London

Nicholas Coleridge

The great and the good from every tribe of London society turned out last night to celebrate the launch of Nicholas Coleridge's new book, Deadly Sins. (The guests were committing at least three of the seven at any given moment.)

See pictures from the party here.

Panic! The Story of Modern Financial Insanity

Although there are a couple of dry extracts from official reports, the bulk of Panic! consists of ground-breaking reports, enlightening interviews and supple commentary. It even includes a couple of satirical pieces.

The Man Who Owns the News

As Michael Wolff notes in his intriguing new biography of Murdoch, the agreement about the Wall Street Journal was ‘publicly and shamelessly ignored’. Murdoch knows that promises to protect editorial integrity are as weak and unenforceable as they are vague and ambiguous, so he has few qualms about giving them.

The Partnership: A History of Goldman Sachs

Every financial-services firm pays homage to the importance of ‘teamwork’, regardless of the reality behind the rhetoric. When I was a lawyer on Wall Street, it was almost a truism that the people who talked most about the importance of being a ‘team player’ were those most out for themselves and the most likely to stab you in the back.

Gucci Wars: How I Survived Murder and Intrigue at the Heart of the World’s Biggest Fashion House

You’ll be expecting Tom Ford, of course. But there isn’t a word about him here. How could you publish a book about the Guccis in 2008 without a single mention of Tom Ford?

It’s Not All About Money: Memoirs of a Private Banker

‘The little gnomes of Zurich’ was a phrase famously used by prime minister Harold Wilson in 1964 to describe Swiss bankers whom he suspected of speculating against the pound. Hans Julius Baer, author of this expansive autobiography, is in the nicest possible way rather a big gnome of Zurich.