Money Talk

• Liar’s Poker: Two Cities, True Greed by Michael Lewis
  Hodder, 224 pp, £12.95, November 1989, ISBN 0 340 49602 9
• Lords of Poverty: The Free-Wheeling Lifestyles, Power, Prestige and Corruption of the Multi-Billion Dollar Aid Business by Graham Hancock
  Macmillan, 234 pp, £14.95, October 1989, ISBN 0 333 43962 7
• High Life by Taki
  Viking, 198 pp, £11.95, October 1989, ISBN 0 670 82956 0
• The Midas Touch: Money, People and Power from West to East by Anthony Sampson
  BBC/Hodder, 212 pp, £15.00, October 1989, ISBN 0 340 48793 3

It is difficult to say whether the Eighties will come to be seen as a decade in which the world was unusually obsessed with money, or merely guilt-ridden about the idea of such an obsession. Certainly television has transported the very hungry and the exceptionally greedy into our living-rooms. Both extremes have turned out to be subjects of morbid fascination: on the one hand the nameless, starving children of Ethiopia, on the other the wheeler-dealers of the international markets, the Michael Milkens and their hundred million dollar salaries.