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Fortune's Spear: The Story of the Blue-blooded Rogue Behind the Most Notorious City Scandal of the 1920s

Fortune's Spear: The Story of the Blue-blooded Rogue Behind the Most Notorious City Scandal of the 1920s

by Martin Vander Weyer (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2011

    $4.51
Synopsis

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.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 352
 Publisher: Elliott & Thompson Limited
Published: 20 Oct 2011
ISBN 10: 1907642315
ISBN 13: 9781907642319
Book Overview: * A richly detailed Edwardian true crime story, perfect for readers of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.; * A little-known story based on brand new research.; * Written by the Business Editor of The Spectator - extensive review and publicity platform.; * Parallels to contemporary financial upheavals, from the fraud of Bernard Madoff to the 2008 global financial crash.; * A new light shone onto a fascinating historical financial world that includes names that still matter today, such as Barclays Bank.

Media Reviews
A wonderfully vivid biography of the man responsible for one of the great City scandals. The 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'
Author Bio
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).