Fortune's Spear by Martin Vander Weyer
Gerard Lee Bevan was the model of an Edwardian swell - arrogant, smooth, well-connected and highly cultured. He married money and influence - his wife Sophie Kenrick was a cousin of the future prime minister Neville Chamberlain - and over the years he kept a string of showgirl mistresses. But his was a success built on fraud and deception, and eventually Bevan could sustain the fiction no longer. After a series of desperate swerves, he fled the country on 8 February 1922, abandoning his family and leaving his stockbroking and insurance empire in ruins. Thus began an extraordinary flight across Europe - disguised as a Frenchman, using a stolen passport, with his mistress at his side. His subsequent arrest in Vienna, and the Old Bailey trial that followed, would shock the entire country. 'Fortune's Spear' is a parable of the way in which the prospect of easy money draws risk-takers in every era into a spiral of greed and deceit. Bevan may have been forgotten, but he richly deserves to be remembered. Drawing on c ontemporary evidence and told with novelistic flair, Martin Vander Weyer's gripping biography brings him vividly to life.
A wonderfully vivid biography of the man responsible for one of the great City scandalsThe world that Martin Vander Weyer recreates with a novelist's flair and historian s attention to detail may be long gone, but this very human morality tale of high talent and high connection fatally compromised by a flawed character is timeless. --David Kynaston, author of 'City of London: The History' Exciting stuff ... It is a rattling good yarn and leaves you wondering whether the man had a rotten core from the beginning or whether it was addiction to money and social position which seduced him into crime. It is a cautionary tale. --Martin Jacomb, 'The Spectator' This well-researched and well-written book is more than the story of a City scandal. It is a fascinating slice of social history and a rumination on fraud and folly. --Allan Massie, 'The Scotsman' 'Fortune's Spear' is a splendidly rich account of a fraud that both symbolises its own era and prefigures our own. Unlike many financial writers, Vander Weyer writes so clearly that even a financial illiterate like myself can just about grasp what he is getting at. He also has a wonderfully broad frame of cultural reference. --Craig Brown, Book of the Week, 'Daily Mail'
Martin Vander Weyer is Business Editor and Any Other Business columnist of The Spectator and a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph, Mail on Sunday and other national newspapers. Before becoming a journalist, he was an investment banker in London, Brussels and the Far East. He is the author of Falling Eagle: The Decline of Barclays Bank (2000) and the editor and principal author of Closing Balances: Business Obituaries from the Daily Telegraph (2006).
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781907642319 |
| ISBN 10 | 1907642315 |
| Title | Fortune's Spear |
| Author | Martin Vander Weyer |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Elliott & Thompson Limited |
| Year published | 2011-10-13 |
| Number of pages | 352 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |