Martin Vander Weyer
I am doomed to read a lot of dull stuff about the financial world, but occasionally there is something more flavoursome. Adam Raphael's Ultimate Risk: The Inside Story of the Lloyd's Catastrophe (Bantam, £16.99) is an outstandingly clear, well- balanced account of the incompetence, cynicism and venality of the pin-striped coterie who (with the assistance of hurri- canes, earthquakes and asbestosis) have all but ruined one of the City's finest institu- tions. The Warburgs by Ron Chernow (Chatto, £25) is a formidably researched saga of the German Jewish banking dynasty, including a fascinating portrait of the brilliant, volatile, strangely melancholy Sir Siegmund Warburg. Worst of the finan- cial genre was The Laundrymen by Jeffrey Robinson (Simon & Schuster, £17.99), a charniless rehash of every drug-money scam from BCCI to Banco Ambrosiano, which in no way deserved its place in the best-seller list. As to fiction, the best thing I have read all year — terse, atmospheric, profound — was Graham Greene's The End of the Affair in an elegant £5.99 I'll get back to you.'
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