Fortune's Spear
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€23.99
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.
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).