Tea-Leafing

Duncan Campbell

  • The Autobiography of a Thief by Bruce Reynolds
    Bantam, 320 pp, £15.99, April 1995, ISBN 0 593 03779 0

A robber is a bandit, an outlaw, a desperado. A thief is a tea-leaf. A robber ends up at the Old Bailey – the London Palladium of the nation’s courts – and gets a ten stretch. A thief appears before the beak at Old Street magistrate’s court and gets three months. A robber takes the girlfriend off to Longchamp for the weekend. A thief goes home to the wife in Up-minster. So why did Bruce Reynolds, a main player in this country’s robbery of the century, choose to call his book The Autobiography of a Thief ?

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