BUTLER TO THE WORLD
HOW BRITAIN BECAME THE SERVANT OF TYCOONS, TAX DODGERS, KLEPTOCRATS AND CRIMINALS
OLIVER BULLOUGH
Profile, 288pp, £20
‘Could a book ever be more timely, ’ asked Simon Nixon in the . Oliver Bullough’s is a ‘highly readable but thoroughly depressing’ analysis of Britain’s role in enabling a ‘shadowy global super-rich’ to ‘launder and hide their vast fortunes’. But for reviewer Tim Adams, ‘to say this unmissable, deeply depressing book... is timely is to miss author Oliver Bullough’s point... Sordid tales of a nation flogging its real estate and its services and its football clubs and its good name to the shadiest and highest bidder, no questions asked, have been hiding in plain sight for decades. It has just seemed in no government’s interest to notice them... Bullough begins by showing how old colonialists found a new niche in recreating the further-flung outposts of empire – the self-governing protectorates of the British Virgin Islands, the Caymans,
