Allister Heath
‘What Stock Do You Like, Warren?’
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
By Alice Schroeder
Bloomsbury 960pp £25 order from our bookshop
It was the exam question we all dreaded. Back in the mid-1990s, when I was an undergraduate at the London School of Economics, lecturers used to enjoy torturing students by posing a simple yet (to us) devastating question.
It went something like this. Given that modern economics states that it is virtually impossible to beat the markets for any extended period of time, how come Warren Buffett keeps on doing so, year after year? Does this mean finance theory is bunkum – or does it mean that Buffett cannot possibly exist, that he must instead be a figment of the media’s febrile imagination?
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
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2
'To me, Elmore Leonard is as comforting in extremity as Pym, and as safe, in the last resort, as Wodehouse. The guys with the best lines are going to come out the other side; the dumb fucks are going to get it in the head or chest.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-spoonful-of-elmore