Books
In Association With
The Richest of the Rich: The Wealthiest 250 People in Britain since 1066
This means that Britain’s richest living person, Lakshmi Mittal, comes in at 20, while top of the list is Alan Rufus, one of the 1066 conquerors, whose £11,000 fortune at 1093 prices is reckoned to be worth £81 billion in today’s money.
When The Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age
The Astors were New York’s first family at a time when that city was coming of age. For a century they embodied what it was to be rich in America’s imperial city.
Great Collectors of Our Time: Art Collecting Since 1945
James Stourton attempts no single grand over-arching narrative in Great Collectors of Our Time, and this is just as well, collectors being as varied a bunch in the what and why of their obsessions as artists.
King of the Club: Richard Grasso and the Survival Of The New York Stock Exchange
On the steps leading into the lobby of the Boca Raton Resort, a giant pink hotel that resembles an architectural cross between the Alhambra and a Las Vegas bordello, Richard Grasso held silent court.
Hedge Hunters: Hedge Fund Masters On The Rewards, The Risk and The Reckoning
It clearly must be difficult describing what makes a great trader. Certainly, no one has yet managed to describe their potent mix with brevity and insight. Hedge Hunters is no exception.
The Black Swan: The Impact Of The Highly Improbable
Discovering America in the 1970s meant discovering the Big Issue book, a kind we still don’t really do here; the big-idea, non-fiction book about the modern world - ideally one with business implications - that will put its author on the cover of Time and onto the major lecture circuit. Such books were piled high in the lovely cathedral bookstores of 5th Avenue then and they sold like mad (still do), so let no-one accuse Americans of neglecting the life of the mind.
The Panic of 1907: Lessons Learned from the Market’s Perfect Storm
One hundred years on must have seemed like a good time to re-visit one of Wall Street’s most severe financial panics. That, presumably, is why Robert Bruner and Sean D. Carr sat down to write The Panic of 1907. But the authors could hardly have expected that another global credit crisis should suddenly appear just as their own work hit the bookstands.
Blue Blood and Mutiny: The Fight for the Soul of Morgan Stanley
Patricia Beard’s telling of the events that led to the ousting of Morgan Stanley’s chairman and chief executive Phil Purcell in 2005 is a clear case of history written by the victors.
Asian Godfathers: Money And Power In Hong Kong And South-East Asia
If you were doing the rounds of the City this autumn you’d have heard a similar story in pretty much every office you stepped into. The fact that housing markets across the Western world were either faltering or crashing, that the UK had just seen its first run on a bank in living memory, did not in any way suggest that there would be an appreciable slowdown in global growth.
The Second Bounce Of The Ball: Turning Risk Into Opportunity
Sir Ronald Cohen is that uncommon beast: a red-blooded capitalist with a socialist conscience. He’s more than that, however. Rarer still, he likes to articulate his views in public.
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