Serious Money

Part guide, part indictment of a yawning wealth gap, Caroline Knowles's eye-opening book reveals how the capital has changed over the decades ... the author's gentle, yet shrewd observations quickly accumulate when seeking out a wide variety of individuals to reveal the quotidian culture of plutocracy. -- Misha Glenny * Financial Times * Knowles' book helps readers to see [London's super-rich] as less secretive, more troubling and a great deal sadder. The anonymised plutocrats and their hangers-on who fill the book, which is all the more scathing by the understatement with which Knowles depicts them, reflect limitless arrogance, waste and injustice ... Serious Money has a serious mission. These vast fortunes, Knowles argues, do not just make people miserable. They are rotting the ties that hold our society together. -- Edward Lucas * The Times * An eye-opening, deeply disturbing, fast-moving journey through the lives, homes and affairs of the filthy rich of London. -- Danny Dorling Fascinating, punchy, thought-provoking. Serious Money exposes the corrosive impact of London's super rich on our economy, society and politics, and comprehensively busts the myth that their wealth trickles down to the rest of us. -- Frances O'Grady A wonderful and vital account of a city ruled by, and for, extreme wealth. -- Anna Minton, author of Big Capital Startling, spirited ... Knowles is alert to arresting details ... a wry primer to the extravagances of the super rich. -- Alex Diggins * The Critic * Years of footwork through the streets of central London have gone into producing this magnificent but disturbing book on the lives and influence of the super-rich. Knowles writes with enviable lightness and pace about how money, property, birth, breeding, contacts, secrecy, parasites and servants have created a class that owns and milks London, a world away from the city's ordinary citizens. A powerful ethnography of plutocratic power. -- Professor Ash Amin, author of Seeing Like a City