Books
In Association With
Spear's Book Awards 2011 Winners
The third Spear’s Book Awards, in association with Citi Private Bank, took place today at Massimo at the Corinthia. Winners included Candia McWilliam, Justin Cartwright and Tom Bower and judges included William Sitwell, Petronella Wyatt and Harry Mount
Typography
I have rarely come into contact with a typewriter, except when bashing away at one at a garage sale and dancing to Dolly Parton's 9-5
All The Devils Are Here
In the last chapter of The Big Short, Michael Lewis traced the roots of the financial crisis to the moment in the Eighties when the Wall Street investment bank Salomon Brothers decided to turn its partnership into a corporation, thereby transferring financial risk to shareholders, in a move that was copied by the other investment banks.
America's Medicis
The Rockefellers are riveting — but spooky too. Riveting because, more than any other family brand, they sum up the idea of the American 19th-century robber baron plutocrat.
No Prams Here
Combating the enemy of creativity, William Cash has established a writers’ retreat at his Elizabethan gatehouse, as the winners of the Spear’s Book Awards will discover
Greene and Hill
I imagine to any passing lorry driver, it probably looked like my car had broken down: it was actually the driver who had
The Guest List
The tyranny of New York’s Four Hundred, the term coined by Mrs Astor’s ‘fervent toady’ Ward McAllister ‘to delimit the socially reliable’ for the purpose of hosting balls in the post-Civil War period, did not hold sway for very long
Sisters of Fortune
After Downton Abbey I was expecting a sort of Sargent-fest from Jehanne Wake’s Sisters of Fortune. I thought it’d be a Gilded Age re-hash for a generation too young to have read Hesketh Pearson’s Pilgrim Daughters and the cottage industry of Dollar Princess publishing that followed
The Fall of the House of Walworth
The Walworths' fall, in the space of two generations, happened during the Gilded Age. Indeed, it was a Gilded Age sensation and is deftly handled by Geoffrey O’Brien in this hybrid of true crime and social history
Why Not Say What Happened?
It’s a familiar story from the world of Jeremy Kyle and Trisha; the story of inadequate underclass parents who can’t cope, can’t give their children what organised, structured, disciplined middle-class types can. But what if the girl’s a Guinness, part of the glamorous, rich Irish brewery clan?
Books
Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour
Michael Lewis
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
Adam Nicolson
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'
Anne McElvoy
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
HNW Events
Spear's/Speechly Bircham Seminar: How to be a philanthropist in the 21st century
21 February 2012
Spear's Young Turk Awards 2012
01 April 2012
Spear's Design for Living Awards 2012
01 May 2012
Spear's Wealth Insight Forum 2012
19 September 2012
The Diary
Mark Hix
04 Jan 2012
Amanda Palmer
22 Nov 2011
Patrick Perrin
11 Oct 2011
Nicky Haslam
05 Aug 2011
Stephen Webster
06 Jul 2011