"The Risk Takers as entrepreneurs are the pirates, the merchant adventurers, the soldiers of fortune of this age and generation. The author has chosen his characters well, and they are mostly "characters." This book gives you an insight into what makes these people tick, and you can play them and judge them. Read this book and go and be a player, not a spectator." -
- Sir Kenneth Cork, Accountancy
The Daily Mail: "Engaging"
The Sunday Express: "Most entertaining."
The Mirror: “Exciting.”
Midweek: "Eclectic and impressive."
Sporting Life: "Racy, amusing, gossipy."
Lloyds List: "Jeffrey Robinson's forthright and sardonic study of the financial power wielders among Britain's entrepreneurs has deadly serious value as well as being a vividly entertaining book."
The Times Literary Supplement: "Robinson makes some pleasingly astringent comments on his risk- takers, whom he is far from viewing with starry eyes."
The Risk Takers was Jeffrey Robinson's first UK Bestseller. A series of portraits in money, ego and power, it came about as he was writing a series of features for Barrons on the businessmen in Mrs. Thatcher's Britain. The timing was right for the emergence of entrepreneurial super-stars so he did for business people what so many sports writers had been doing for athletes.
A stark insight into the high-flying ways of international business, The Risk Takers was a firsthand chance to get to know the men who make it happen.
From the unmistakable Robert Maxwell, to the quiet big money gourmet food and restaurant dealings of the Roux Brothers; from the diplomatic games of Tiny Rowland to the laid-back '60s approach of Richard Branson; the City is revealed as a hornets' nest of wheeling and dealing with fortunes to be made or lost.
There is the Turkish Cypriot cunning of Asil Nadir; the no-lose risks of the world's thoroughbred king Robert Sangster; the opportunism of Jacob Rothschild; James Hanson and Gordon White and their Hanson Trust as take-over winners; Gerald Ronson and his Heron Corp and how to lose the take-over battle yet still win the war; the 'mysterious' Dr Marwan; ex-magician Paul Raymond on sex and real estate; the flamboyant oil baron David Thieme; Lloyd's outcast Ian 'Goldfinger' Posgate; the best self-publicist in Europe, Clive Sinclair; the only British retailer who might just conquer America, Terence Conran; and others.
This extremely upbeat, highly readable yet deadly serious look at the City's high-flyers is for anyone interested in big business, and everyone interested in the personalities who make the headlines.
The Risk Takers lifts the men - and in those days it was, sadly, only men - who made headlines off the front page and puts them under the microscope to reveal for the very first time in depth, just what makes them tick.
For The Risk Takers - Five Years On, Robinson returns for a second look, to see who's won, who's lost and what new faces have come onto the stage.
When money is how you keep score.
