Martin Vander Weyer
How to Spend It
The Rich: From Slaves to Super-Yachts – A 2,000-Year History
By John Kampfner
Little, Brown 454pp £25 order from our bookshop
‘The wealthy invariably win’ is an observation by John Kampfner that has recently been given intellectual underpinning by Thomas Piketty, who in Capital in the Twenty-First Century came up with a neat little formula to prove that the rich always get richer relative to the rest of us because the rate of return on capital is higher than the rate of growth in the economy as a whole. But the celebrity French economist spoiled his dazzling simplification by packing seven hundred pages of theory and (some say unreliable) data around it. A former New Statesman editor, Kampfner has found a more readable way of tackling the same theme, by retelling the life stories of a cross-section of the super rich over the past two thousand years and drawing parallels between them.
To some extent, it must be said, the parallels are obvious. To amass a giant fortune, whether in ancient Rome or modern Russia, has always required ruthlessness and political clout. Great philanthropy, be that in Renaissance Florence or 19th-century America, is very often the fruit of an earlier phase of
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'This is entertainment of the highest class.'
@NJCooper_crime reviews new thrillers by Mick Herron, Kassandra Montag, @LVaughanwrites, @AuthorSJBolton, @ajaychow, @tombradby, @SaraParetsky, @writejemmawayne & @GillianMAuthor.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/may-2022-crime-round-up
'The day Simon and I Vespa-d from Daunt to Daunt to John Sandoe to Hatchards to Goldsboro, places where many of the booksellers have become my friends over the years, was the one with the high puffy clouds, the very strong breeze, the cool-warm sunlight.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/temple-of-vespa
Some salient thoughts on book collecting from Michael Dirda with a semi tragic conclusion that I suspect many of us can relate to from the @Lit_Review #WednesdayMotivation