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The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times
Bottom of the pile
24
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
30/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Lionel Barber
Publisher:
WH Allen
Date:
February 5, 2021
A no-holds-barred diary of life behind the headlines of Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times for the tech boom, the global financial crisis, the rise of China, Brexit, and mainstream media's fight for survival in the age of fake news.
What The Reviewers Say
As an advertisement for himself, in other words, Barber’s publication of his diaries in what seems a heavily edited and revised form, is, for the first 100 pages or so, rather counter-productive. A reader uninterested in the newspaper business would not guess that this is the man who raised the FT’s journalistic standards, made it a global brand, navigated its transition into the digital world, attracted a million paying readers and steered it through a takeover by the Japanese media group Nikkei.
The fact that The Powerful and the Damned is self-serving and egotistical doesn’t mean that it is not an enjoyable book, at times quite delicious.
There are some cinematic touches to Barber’s memoir of his long reign as FT editor from October 2005 to January 2020. This is true of his own self-portrait (gun-slinging journalistic enforcer in the Evans and Bradlee tradition, friend to the powerful, nemesis to the damned). It spills into his portrayal of the important people (many of them friends) he met while occupying the editor’s chair — the US treasury secretary who is ‘one tough hombre’, the financial masters of the universe with ‘matinee idol’ good looks, assorted despots and bureaucrats. That is a shame, because Barber has a good story to tell, and one that would have been better told without the swagger. In fact he has several good stories.
An account of what happened in the world his paper was covering, and who whispered or yelled what into the editor’s ear.
