23 Nov '11

“If it had a weakness it was that while it put Victorian generosity down to religious faith (devout Quakers and Jews led the pack of givers), it failed to ask why bankers today give away so little. Are they utterly godless or do they perhaps feel that charity has been replaced by a welfare state to which they doubtless believe they contribute plenty?”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“Perhaps the most telling thing about that title, though, was its confident prejudice, the assumption that nobody would mind the implication that all bankers are now bad. I suppose bankers might feel wounded by this assumption, but then who cares about the bankers’ feelings these days?”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“Hislop of course was not quite daft enough to think those values could ever come back. That was why he left the final verdict to be spoken by the current Lord Rothschild, whose own banking clan has donated no small amount to the world’s worthy causes.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“Even when 19^th-century bankers turned bad, Hislop reckoned they still had some good in them. John Sadleir, the banker on whom Dickens based Mr. Merdle in Little Dorrit, had enough sense of shame to kill himself for losing all his investors’ cash. Hislop stopped short of suggesting that 21^st-century bankers would have more friends if some of their number were to do likewise. But only just.”
John Crace, The Guardian

“You had to be a newspaper person to understand how utterly depressing Andrew Rossi’s witty documentary was. It showed a great whale of a paper shredding blood to Internet sharks who bit out chunks of its subscription base, advertising revenue and authority.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“It also contained, for any British journalist, one jaw-dropping scene in which a journalist called David Carr told his section editor how he was doing on his latest piece. ‘I’m doing two more weeks of reporting on it,’ he said, ‘then I’m going to take a week to write it and then I’ll show it to you.’ Hmmm…wonder why it’s haemorrhaging cash.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“And he didn’t much care for bankers either, identifying them, in The Grapes of Wrath, as the conscienceless force that had provoked the biggest internal migration the US had ever seen.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“He was nevertheless an escaped convict. In fact he was the third escaped convict to feature in this season of CSI. Whatever else it does, I reckon the prison authority needs to get the locks changed.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“Principally because it failed to be either that adventurous or that much of a guide.”
John Crace, The Guardian