This is the second in a series of memoirs from Naim Attallah – entrepreneur, banker, and one-time generous patron of Literary Review. The books, written in the third person, chart the rise of Attallah from a boy in Nazareth to his present situation. This volume concerns his early career in business, and has at its centre the rise and fall of Intra Bank, run by the charismatic Yusif Bedas, who, Attallah is never shy to tell us, was the bank.

At the start, Attallah is working for a French bank and living with his wife Maria in a tiny Holland Park flat with a shared kitchen and bathroom: ‘The days of sowing his wild oats were over.’ But, on the strength of a gut instinct, he falls for Bedas’s charms