Who Runs This Place? - Softcover

Sampson, Anthony

3.78

110 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0719565669 ISBN 13: 9780719565663

Publisher: John Murray Publishers Ltd, 2005

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

These familiar questions are now far more topical and urgent. The peaks of both government and finance have become far more concentrated and isolated; checks and balances have become much weaker; the costs of wrong decisions have often proved disastrous to the public.

Anthony Sampson has spent forty years dissecting the power-structure, with unique access to people at the top, to produce his best-selling Anatomies of Britain. Now in this intensely topical book, he surveys a much more troubled scene with more anger and impatience. He looks at the whole panoply of power, from an embattled Number Ten to the murky intelligence spooks, from corporate boardrooms to banks and pension funds. Everywhere he talks to the people who really know their inside workings.

Who Runs This Place? is written not just for those inside the Westminster Bubble. It is addressed in fresh and vivid terms to those who need to understand the institutions and careers they are choosing, and the bosses who will influence their whole future. And it comes at a time when the British people are clamouring to comprehend the secretive groups that pull the levers, behind the facades. It is essential reading.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

No one has matched Sampson's combination of analysis, networking and sharp drafting ... A model of its kind (Times Higher Education Supplement)

A compelling analysis of power (The Times)

An exhilarating air of authority... [thanks to] its author's happy and unusual combination of wisdom and research (Mail on Sunday)

An impressive and immediate air of gravitas.. Sampson is a clear thinker who manages to gently ease the reader throuh a vast and complex subject (Scotland on Sunday)

Many shrewd and informative chapters (Sunday Telegraph)

A superb diagnosis... enormously readable, containing a wealth of entertaining apercus and digressions... [and] a wit that is as sharp as his scalpel (New Statesman)

A coherent critique about the nature of political power in British society (The Scotsman)

He has stood back from the trees and given us a view of the wood. He is right to find it rotten (Sunday Times)

This is a wise, perceptive and not unduly pessimistic book (Spectator)

Sampson sees power clearly and calmly, as Trollope or Galsworthy did; and it is not a pretty sight...He comes shrewdly at Mr Blair from an unprotected flank (Daily Telegraph)

Book Description:

Who holds power? How do they use it? Are they accountable?: the questions addressed in this unflinching expos� of power in Britain.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.