Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

Steve Roud

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Dan McCrum

When journalist Dan McCrum followed a tip to investigate the hot new tech company challenging Silicon Valley, everything about Wirecard looked a little too good to be true: offices were sprouting up around the world, it was reporting runaway growth and the CEO even wore a black turtleneck in tribute to Steve Jobs. In the space of a few short years, the company had come from nowhere to overtake industry giants like Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank on the stock market. 
 
As McCrum dug deeper, he encountered a story stranger and more dangerous than he ever imagined: a world of short sellers and whistleblowers, pornographers and private militias, hackers and spies. Before long he realised that he wasn't the only one in pursuit. Shadowy figures were following him through the streets of London, high-flying lawyers were sending ominous letters to his boss, and he was named as the prime suspect in a criminal inquiry. The race was on to prove his suspicions and clear his name. 
 
Money Men is the astonishing inside story of Wirecard's multi-billion-dollar fraud, Europe's biggest new tech darling revealed as a house of cards. Uncovering fake bank accounts, fake offices and possibly even a fake death, McCrum offers a searing exposé that will finally lay bare the truth.

Money Men

A Hot Startup, A Billion Dollar Fraud, A Fight for the Truth

Louai Al Roumani

A STORY OF HOPE, PERSEVERANCE AND RESILIENCE IN THE MIDST OF CHAOS 
 
Louai Al Roumani was head of finance and planning at one of the largest banks in Syria when the war broke out in 2011. 
 
In Lessons from a Warzone, Al Roumani shares his very personal account of coping with the day-to-day realities of leading an organization in dangerous and hostile conditions. His story shows how inspiration can come from the unlikeliest of places, and how a business can not only survive in chaos, but can learn to thrive - the bank became the undisputed sector leader as people's trust in its capability to protect their life-long savings strengthened. 
 
In this book, Al Roumani distils the knowledge and skills he and his colleagues developed while steering the bank through four impossible years into ten lessons applicable to any leader facing a crisis today. His valuable and often counterintuitive advice will help anyone understand how to be resilient even in the most challenging of times.

Lessons from a Warzone

How to be a Resilient Leader in Times of Crisis

William D. Cohan

William D. Cohan's The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères &amp; Co. is the astonishing story of the world's most elite and legendary investment bank - and the men who reigned over it all. 
 
 For over 150 years Lazard Frères had stood apart from other Wall Street firms by offering ultra-wealthy clients the wisdom of its 'Great Men': from Felix Rohatyn, the escapee from Nazi-occupied France turned financial genius, to Michel David-Weill, the inscrutable French billionaire 'Sun King'; from Steve Rattner, the boy wonder from Long Island who clashed violently with the old guard, to larger-than-life CEO Bruce Wasserstein, 'Bid-Em-Up-Bruce', who broke with the bank's traditions and made himself billions in the process. They amassed unimaginable fortunes and would stop at nothing to make a deal, until their titanic egos started to jeopardize everything. 
 
 In The Last Tycoons William Cohan, himself a former high-level Wall Street banker, takes us into their mysterious and secretive world, telling a story of ruthless ambition, whispered advice, explosive feuds, glamorous mistresses, decadent excesses and unimaginable wealth. 
 
 'Spellbinding' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Financial Times 
 
 'A definitive account ... it lives up to the billing' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;The Times 
 
 'Has sent a jolt through Lazard and the rest of Wall Street' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Wall Street Journal 
 
 William D. Cohan was an award-winning investigative journalist before embarking on a seventeen-year career as an investment banker on Wall Street. His first book, The Last Tycoons, about Lazard, won the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award and was a New York Times bestseller. His second book, House of Cards, also a bestseller, is an account of the last days of Bear Stearns &amp; Co. He is also the author of Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World.

The Last Tycoons

The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.

Lionel Barber

Gambling Man is the biography of one of the world’s least known but most consequential investors. Japan’s Masayoshi Son has made and lost several fortunes, investing or controlling assets worth $1 trillion in the past two decades through his media-tech giant, SoftBank. He bankrolled Alibaba, China’s internet colossus, before the world had heard about it; plotted with Steve Jobs to turn the iPhone into a wonder product; and financed hundreds of tech start-ups, fuelling the biggest boom Silicon Valley has ever seen.This book takes you on Son’s wild ride, from his birthplace in a Korean slum in post-war Japan to the modern-day temples of power. It speeds through Donald Trump’s golden skyscraper in Manhattan, the royal palaces of Riyadh and the throne rooms of China’s Marxist rulers; all places where Son has deployed his unique blend of financial engineering and crazy risk-taking.Son’s story captures a 25 year-span of hyper-globalisation in which money, technologies and ideas flowed freely. From the launch of the microchip to the advent of artificial intelligence, he has ridden the technological wave which has created extraordinary wealth and economic change. His topsy-turvy business career is testimony to the power of optimism, daring to dream, ever in search of the Next Big Thing.As an ethnic Korean in Japan, Son has overcome adversity and discrimination to become Japan’s best-known businessman and empire-builder but he remains an elusive, intensely private figure. This book, by a former editor of the Financial Times, contains a wealth of new information and has had the co-operation of many of the key participants, including Son himself. Written with a verve appropriate to its subject, Gambling Man reveals the man behind the money, what drives him, why he matters, and what he plans for his next act.

Gambling Man

The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son

Gary Stevenson

'If you were gonna rob a bank, and you saw the vault door there, left open, what would you do? Would you wait around?' 
 
Ever since he was a kid, kicking broken footballs on the streets of East London in the shadow of Canary Wharf's skyscrapers, Gary wanted something better. Something a whole lot bigger. Then he won a competition run by a bank: 'The Trading Game'. The prize: a golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader in the whole city. A place where you could make more money than you'd ever imagined. Where your colleagues are dysfunctional maths geniuses, overfed public schoolboys and borderline psychopaths, yet they start to feel like family. Where soon you're the bank's most profitable trader, dealing in nearly a trillion dollars. A day. Where you dream of numbers in your sleep - and then stop sleeping at all. But what happens when winning starts to feel like losing? When the easiest way to make money is to bet on millions becoming poorer and poorer - and, as the economy starts slipping off a precipice, your own sanity starts slipping with it? You want to stop, but you can't. Because nobody ever leaves. Would you stick, or quit? Even if it meant risking everything? 
 
This is an outrageous, unvarnished, white-knuckle journey to the dark heart of an intoxicating world - from someone who survived the game.

The Trading Game

A Confession

Sabrina Waldorf

Hallie Woods works at her dream magazine in NYC, so when she's given her very own column, she can't believe her luck - even if it is a little unconventional. Hallie must find and date the hottest guy on Wall Street, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes and all, and document every moment of it. But as she flirts with all of the gilet clad men she can find, there's one who keeps getting in her way. 
 
On paper, James Rossi is the typical finance bro. But, after being burned by an ex-girlfriend who used him for his money, he's also fiercely protective of himself, and his friends. So when he realises there's a girl in his favourite bar every Thursday, trying to flirt with his colleagues as fodder for an article, he decides to sabotage her plans. 
 
But as Hallie and James clash week after week over their whiskey sodas, their dislike for each other turns into something more. Hallie might have found her man in finance, but she also has a choice to make. Will she continue to write her article, or take a chance at true love?

I'm Looking For a Man in Finance

Michael Lewis

'I asked him how much it would take for him to sell FTX and go do something other than make money. He thought the question over. &quot;One hundred and fifty billion dollars,&quot; he finally said-though he added that he had use for &quot;infinity dollars&quot;...' 
 
Sam Bankman-Fried wasn't just rich. Before he turned thirty he'd become the world's youngest billionaire, making a record fortune in the crypto frenzy. CEOs, celebrities and world leaders vied for his time. At one point he considered paying off the entire national debt of the Bahamas so he could take his business there. 
 
Then it all fell apart. 
 
Who was this Gatsby of the crypto world, a rumpled guy in cargo shorts, whose eyes twitched across TV interviews as he played video games on the side, who even his million-dollar investors still found a mystery? What gave him such an extraordinary ability to make money - and how did his empire collapse so spectacularly? 
 
Michael Lewis was there when it happened, having got to know Bankman-Fried during his epic rise. In Going Infinite he tells us a story like no other, taking us through the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own. Both psychological portrait of a preternaturally gifted 'thinking machine', and wild financial roller-coaster ride, this is a twenty-first-century epic of high-frequency trading and even higher stakes, of crypto mania and insane amounts of money, of hubris and downfall. No one could tell it better.

Going Infinite

The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

Julian Hoppit

It has always been an important part of British self-image to see the United Kingdom as an ancient, organic and sensibly managed place, in striking contrast to the convulsions of other European countries. Yet, as Julian Hoppit makes clear in this fascinating and surprising book, beneath the complacent surface the United Kingdom has in fact been in a constant, often very tense argument with itself about how it should be run and, most significantly, who should pay for what. 
 
 The book takes its argument from an eighteenth century cartoon which shows the central state as the 'Dreadful Monster', gorging itself at the dinner table on all the taxes it can grab. Meanwhile the 'Poor Relations' - Scotland, Wales and Ireland, both poor because of tax but also poor in the sense of needing special treatment - are viewed in London as an endless 'drain on the state'. With drastically different levels of prosperity, population, industry, agriculture and accessibility between the United Kingdom's different nations, what is a fair basis for paying for the state?

The Dreadful Monster and its Poor Relations

Taxing, Spending and the United Kingdom, 1707-2021

Bob Burg

John David Mann

The Go-Giver tells the story of an ambitious young man named Joe who yearns for success. Joe is a true go-getter, though sometimes he feels as if the harder and faster he works, the further away his goals seem to be. 
 
One day, desparate to land a key sale at the end of a bad quarter, he seeks advice from the enigmatic Pindar, a legendary consultant referred to by many devotees sinply as the Chairman. Over the next week, Pindar introduces Joe to a series of successful 'go-givers' who teach him how to open himself up to the power of giving.

The Go-Giver

A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea

John Gapper

Penguin Specials are designed to fill a gap. Written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, they are original and exclusively in digital form. This is John Gapper's foray into the world of rogue traders. 
 
Unlike most bankers, they are household names: Nick Leeson of Barings, Jerome Kerviel of Societe Generale, John Rusnak of Allied Irish Bank. And now the 31 year-old Kweku Adoboli, who allegedly ran up $2.3bn in losses at UBS. These are the men who have bought banks to their knees and global financial systems to a halt. Each time the banks declare themselves to be innocent victims of a fraud. 
 
But why do traders keep on committing apparently senseless crimes, with little benefit apart from higher bonuses and a risk of ending up in prison? And why do banks, which should have learned the tricks of the traders, keep being deceived? 
 
In this Penguin Special, the Financial Times' associate editor John Gapper unlocks the mystery by delving into the evolutionary risk-taking instincts of both humans and animals - from yellow-eyed junco sparrows in Arizona to honey-bees. He reveals how banks encourage their traders to evade risk limits, and shows how the rogue traders merely mimic the strategies used by their firms to seem more profitable than they really are. 
 
A rogue trader is often an outsider who starts in a lowly role and gambles with a bank's money in a bid to become a star. Gapper traces patterns of behaviour and personality that could be used to catch them before disaster strikes. But do the banks really want to? And are the rogue traders just the symptoms of a financial system gone rogue?

How to be a Rogue Trader

Niall Ferguson

Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot. Call it what you like, it matters now more than ever. In The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is the foundation of all human progress and the lifeblood of history. From the cash injection that funded the Italian Renaissance to the stock market bubble that sparked the French Revolution, from the bonds that fuelled Britain's war effort to the Wall Street Crash and today's meltdown, this is the story of boom and bust as it's never been told before. Whether you're scraping by or rolling in it, there's no better time to understand the ascent of money.

The Ascent of Money

A Financial History of the World

Guy Hands

Diagnosed at the age of five as severely dyslexic, Guy Hands managed to overcome the challenges of school to start his own private equity company, and in The Dealmaker he shares the ups and downs of a tumultuous career as a serial entrepreneur. He gives blow-by-blow descriptions of the huge deals that he has done over the years, first at Nomura and then as head of his own company, Terra Firma. He explains how he approaches each opportunity, whether that involves cinema chains, pubs, aircraft leasing or green energy. And he offers a brutally honest appraisal of the deal that almost bankrupted him - the acquisition of multinational music recording and publishing company EMI in 2007, just as a global financial crash loomed on the horizon. Above all, he gives the reader a real sense of what it's like inside the secretive world of private equity, describing in frank detail the pressures and rewards involved. 
 
Insightful and page-turning, The Dealmaker will prove inspirational and essential reading for all those who want to understand how huge business negotiations are done, and what makes one of private equity's biggest players tick.

The Dealmaker

Lessons from a Life in Private Equity

Seth Freedman

What is it like to make millions before you turn 20? What drives City traders to excess in their quest for extreme wealth? And what happens when they lose it all overnight? This is the first account of life in today's Square Mile, laying bare the tricks, lifestyles and minds of the men who gamble with millions and influence all our lives. It's a thrilling insider story, full of anecdotes and personalities in the style of Liar's Poker and Kitchen Confidential.

Binge Trading

The real inside story of cash, cocaine and corruption in the City

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
'Silicon Valley needed a history lesson and Ferguson has provided it' Eric Schmidt 
 
Most history is about the people at the top of the towers of power. But what if the real action is in the social networks down below, in the town squares? Niall Ferguson, the international bestselling author of Empire, The Ascent of Money and Civilization, brilliantly recasts past and present as an unending contest between hierarchies and networks. 
 
'Provocative, snappy, a rare book ... fasten your seatbelts' Peter Frankopan, Daily Telegraph 
 
'Immensely stimulating, absorbing, illuminating ... sends ideas blazing all over the place ... one of the best popular historians of our time' David Goodhart, Prospect 
 
'Powerful, fast-paced ... a pull-yourself-together warning to the present by way of arresting historical precedent' Andrew Anthony, Guardian 
 
'Captivating and compelling' Jonathan A. Knee, The New York Times

The Square and the Tower

Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power

Joseph E. Stiglitz

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of Globalization and Its Discontents comes a corruscating analysis of the boom and bust of the 1990s - how and why it happened, how the seeds of destruction were sown in the midst of apparent prosperity, and how America and the world are still failing to learn the lessons from what went wrong. 
 
The Roaring Nineties is in part the story of how the corrupt and greedy got their comeuppance. But Stiglitz also develops a convinving alternative to the free-market mantra. He shows why greed is not good and how if left unchecked it leads to deceptions, distortions and disasters. He argues that achieving the right balance between government and the market is the best way towards sustained growth and efficiency, and that both companies and economies must to some extent be regulated by trust and consideration for others. This isn't just good morality - it's good economics too.

The Roaring Nineties

Why We're Paying the Price for the Greediest Decade in History

Simon Kelly

Simon Kelly's involvement in property development began when, as a computer-mad child in the 1980s, he started making spreadsheets for his father, the developer Paddy Kelly. By 2008, when the Irish property market crashed, Simon and Paddy owed their creditors nearly a billion euro. In 2009, they were the first big developers to admit they were bust - and they encouraged their fellow developers to face reality in the same way. In 2010, in the pages of a national newspaper, Simon Kelly apologized for his part in the long-term damage created by the property bubble. 
 
Until now, the story of Ireland's property boom and bust has been told only by people on the outside. The bankers and the developers have kept quiet. Now, Simon Kelly breaks the silence with this vivid and unsparing account of how it all worked and why it went sour. He brings us to the muddy fields, humble cafés and grand dining rooms where the deals were made; he explains how it was that debt always begat more debt; and he takes us through the hitherto opaque portals of Anglo Irish Bank, the Kellys' main lender. 
 
In an account packed with telling and indiscreet detail, Simon Kelly makes no excuses for ending up bust. He simply shows how it happened - to him, to other developers, to the banks, and to the country. In doing so, he courageously breaks ranks with the insiders who created this disaster, and who would prefer to blame 'international forces', bad luck, or one another. Breakfast with Anglo is a landmark in our national accounting of the present crisis, an essential read for anyone who wants to know how we got into this mess and how we might begin to think about getting out of it.

Breakfast with Anglo

Sebastian Mallaby

From an award-winning financial historian comes the gripping, character-driven story of venture capital and the world it made 
 
Innovations rarely come from "experts." Jeff Bezos was not a bookseller; Elon Musk was not in the auto industry. When it comes to innovation, a legendary venture capitalist told Sebastian Mallaby, the future cannot be predicted, it can only be discovered. Most attempts at discovery fail, but a few succeed at such a scale that they more than make up for everything else. That extreme ratio of success and failure is the power law that drives venture capital, Silicon Valley, the tech sector, and, by extension, the world. 
 
Drawing on unprecedented access to the most celebrated venture capitalists of all time, award-winning financial historian Sebastian Mallaby tells the story of this strange tribe of financiers who have funded the world's most successful companies, from Google to SpaceX to Alibaba. With a riveting blend of storytelling and analysis, The Power Law makes sense of the seeming randomness of success in venture capital, an industry that relies, for good and ill, on gut instinct and personality rather than spreadsheets and data. We learn the unvarnished truth about some of the most iconic triumphs and infamous disasters in the history of tech, from the comedy of errors that was the birth of Apple to the venture funding that fostered hubris at WeWork and Uber to the industry's notorious lack of women and ethnic minorities. 
 
Now the power law echoes around the world: it has transformed China's digital economy beyond recognition, and London is one of the top cities for venture capital investment. By taking us so deeply into the VCs' game, The Power Law helps us think about our own future through their eyes.

The Power Law

Venture Capital and the Art of Disruption

Philip Coggan

What happens in the City has never affected us more 
 
In this excellent guide, now fully revised and updated, leading financial journalist Philip Coggan cuts through the headlines, the scandals and the jargon to explain the nuts and bolts of the financial system. 
What causes the pound to rise or interest rates to fall? Which are the institutions that really matter? Why is it we need the Money Machine - and what happens when it crashes? Coggan provides clear and concise answers and shows why we should all be more familiar with a system we so intimately depend upon.

The Money Machine

How the City Works

David Edgerton

Out of a liberal, capitalist, genuinely global power of a unique kind, there arose from the 1940s a distinct British nation. This nation was committed to internal change, making it much more like the great continental powers. From the 1970s it became bound up both with the European Union and with foreign capital in new ways. David Edgerton's fascinating perspective produces refreshed understanding of everything from the nature of British politics to the performance of British industry. 
 
Packed with surprising examples and arguments, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation gives us a grown-up, unsentimental history, one which is crucial at a moment of serious reconsideration for the country and its future.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation

A Twentieth-Century History

Philip Augar

'A brilliantly readable account, based on exceptional access, of the transformation of the old Quaker bank into a hard-charging capitalist adventurer ... both a thriller and a reminder that business is fascinating because all human life is there' John Plender, Financial Times 
 
Based on unparalleled access to those involved, and told with compelling pace and drama, The Bank that Lived a Little describes three decades of boardroom intrigue at one of Britain's biggest financial institutions. In a tale of feuds, grandiose dreams and a struggle for supremacy between rival strategies and their adherents, Philip Augar gives a riveting account of Barclays' journey from an old Quaker bank to a full-throttle capitalist machine. The disagreement between those ambitious for Barclays to join the top table of global banks, and those preferring a smaller domestic role more in keeping with the bank's traditions, cost three chief executives their jobs and continues to divide opinion within Barclays, the City and beyond. 
 
This is an extraordinary corporate thriller, which among much else describes how Barclays came to buy Lehman Brothers for a bargain price in 2008, why it was so keen to avoid taking government funding during the financial crisis, and the price shareholders have paid for a decade of barely controlled ambition. But Augar also shows how Barclays' experiences are a paradigm for Britain's social and economic life over thirty years, which saw the City move from the edge of the economy to its very centre. These decades created unprecedented prosperity for a tiny number, and made the reputations of governments and individuals but then left many of them in tatters. 
 
The leveraged society, the winner-takes-all mentality and our present era of austerity can all be traced to the influence of banks such as Barclays. Augar's book tells this rollercoaster story from the perspective of many of its participants - and also of those affected by the grip they came to have on Britain.

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