Kathleen Burk

Saviour of the City

High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg

By

Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 537pp £25 order from our bookshop

The problem with legendary figures is that they can be less than fully developed human beings. Take Siegmund Warburg, for instance. According to Niall Ferguson in this substantial and enjoyable biography, Warburg was a visionary and a thinker, the man who invented the hostile takeover, the Eurobond market and the index-linked bond. In short, he saved the City of London as an international financial centre. But he could also be a fickle friend, a bullying employer and an appalling father. He was the type of man whom it was safer to admire from a distance.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    Follow Us