No shortage of bedtime financial reading
WATERSTONES in Leadenhall Market is becoming a popular City hangout. For evidence look no further than the photograph above. The Capitalist reported a couple of weeks ago that City A.M’s Sam Torrance was spotted scribbling away there; now ex-corporate financier Tony Drury has done the same, signing copies of his second novel The Deal while chums guzzled refreshments. The book tells the story of a financier falling in love with a woman who won’t go to bed with him unless he raises £2m for her brother’s publishing company. Coincidentally Drury helped raise the capital to fund Quercus, the publisher of the Stieg Larsson Millennium trilogy – though in this case, art didn’t imitate life.
■ IF your appetite for financial literature hasn’t been satisfied by Drury, why not order the new tome from ex-Goldmanite and muppet-botherer Greg Smith? The ex-banker, for whom earning $500k and living in Belsize Park wasn’t enough, sent a rather bitter open letter of resignation to the New York Times in March. How much insight his book gives into the machinery of GS is debatable, but Smith’s musings are suitable for entertainment purposes (though The Capitalist could do without his anecdote about spotting Lloyd Blankfein naked in the gym, thanks).