This year is the centenary of the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act, which sought to halt the sale of titles by British governments. Stephen Bates, a Guardian journalist and social historian, marks this anniversary with a canny, fluent and diverting biography of a criminal called Arthur Maundy Gregory. In the Lloyd George ascendancy after 1918, Gregory became notorious as a suave and glossy tout selling knighthoods and hereditary titles. He took a cut on the transactions, while the bulk of the proceeds went to Liberal or Conservative Party funds. One shrewd Scotsman, a whisky distiller named Buchanan, paid by cheque for his barony and ensured its receipt by signing ‘Woolavington’, the title that he intended to take. Gregory preferred cash down or bearer bonds.

He was born in 1877, the son of a clergyman. There is no sign of affection or desire in his life other than the love of money and a hog’s need for the limelight. His most enduring friendship, from boyhood onwards, was with Harold Davidson, the lecher and defrocked Rector of Stiffkey, who was eventually killed in a sideshow at Skegness by a lion called Freddie. Gregory was a maladjusted and calculating loner. Every dodge was planned well ahead, each instance of sly, unfeeling misanthropy covered by his stout hail-fellow-well-met performance.

As a young man Gregory worked as a ventriloquist, managed a burlesque and pantomime house in Southampton, was detected as a petty embezzler, became an impresario, was fined by magistrates for casting a winsome eight-year-old in a ballet and finally founded a society magazine called Mayfair and Town Topics in