Who Runs This Place? - Softcover

Anthony Sampson's Who Runs This Place? Asks New Labour's central question. * Observer * Sampson blows away the smoke that obscures British democracy and ...dissects an old organism still alive and diseased with new secrets. * The Times * Sampson's last book is up there with his best * Evening Standard * This anatomy dissects an old organism still alive and diseased with new secrets * The Times * A contemporary history with a strong sense of historical change * John Hudson, BBC History * 'A superb field-guide to "the masters of the marketplace" * Independent * Sampson's overview of today's corrupt, nepotistic, celebrity-obsessed Britain makes for fascinating, if depressing, reading * Daily Telegraph * Britain's anatomy is...illuminated by the unmatched politico-social lucidity of a fine mind...a wonderfully dismaying book * Nadine Gordimer, Times Literary Supplement * The leap this books asks us to make - the comparison between the Britain of 1962 and that of 2004 - is useful and hugely instructive. * Guardian * Sampson succeeds in providing an exhaustive answer to the question he has set himself in the title * The Guardian * Indefatigable... in researching information and marshalling facts * The Evening Standard * Brilliantly written and deeply sobering * JG Ballard * His lucid prose dissects the new centres of power ... A bracing read * JG Ballard, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year * An important book, raising an increasingly urgent set of questions about who has the power in Tony Blair's Britain, and for whom they exercise it. * The Spokesman Manifesto 50 * 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 * This is a wise, perceptive and not unduly pessimistic book * Spectator * He has stood back from the trees and given us a view of the wood. He is right to find it rotten * Sunday Times * A coherent critique about the nature of political power in British society * The Scotsman * 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 * Many shrewd and informative chapters * Sunday Telegraph * 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 * An exhilarating air of authority... [thanks to] its author's happy and unusual combination of wisdom and research * Mail on Sunday * A compelling analysis of power * The Times * No one has matched Sampson's combination of analysis, networking and sharp drafting ... A model of its kind * Times Higher Education Supplement *

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.