An ideal banker

At last, thirty years after his death, we have a proper biography of the enigmatic but inspirational banker Siegmund Warburg, extensively researched and beautifully written. Previous efforts fell short. A Man of Influence (1988), written by Jacques Attali, workaholic aide to President Mitterrand, showed a careless disregard for accuracy. The Warburgs (1993) by Ron Chernow contained a great deal of interesting information, including for the first time a public account of Warburg’s affair with the Russian prima ballerina, Danilova, but left the impression, in the words of his astute long-time partner, troubleshooter and friend Henry Grunfeld, that Siegmund Warburg was not a man you would want to meet. David Kynaston, author of an authoritative four volume history of the City of London from 1815 to 2002, wrote an excellent appreciation to mark the centenary in 2002 of Siegmund Warburg’s birth, but it was just sixty pages long in which it was hard to do full justice to such a wide-ranging life. More than half a dozen former members of his eponymously named merchant bank, S.G.Warburg & Co., (known as Warburgs) have published their memoirs, often revealing and sometimes amusing, but these were necessarily subjective and written in the context of their own careers.

The author is none other than Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard and influential geopolitical and financial guru. He has had access to Siegmund Warburg’s voluminous private papers, of which he has made good use, often entertainingly, and has read widely: as evidenced by a twenty-one page bibliography. It’s his first pure biography, and it’s a blockbuster in which he has succeeded in bringing together the diverse strands of Warburg’s remarkable life in an illuminating and convincing way.

Warburg believed that the ideal banker was an all-rounder with an appreciation of literature and the arts, rather than a specialist immersed in financial matters.