Caroline Knowles is a professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Currently the Director of the British Academy's Cities and Infrastructure programme, she has carried out research in London, Hong Kong, Beijing, Fuzhou, Addis Ababa, Kuwait City and Seoul. Knowles is the author of Flip-Flop- A Journey through Globalisation's Backroads, and co-author of Hong Kong- Migrant Lives, Landscapes and Journeys.
Part guide, part indictment of a yawning wealth gap, Caroline
Knowles's eye-opening book reveals how the capital has changed over
the decades ... the author's gentle, yet shrewd observations
quickly accumulate when seeking out a wide variety of individuals
to reveal the quotidian culture of plutocracy.
*Financial Times*
Knowles' book helps readers to see [London's super-rich] as less
secretive, more troubling and a great deal sadder ... Serious Money
has a serious mission. These vast fortunes, Knowles argues, do not
just make people miserable. They are rotting the ties that hold our
society together.
*The Times*
Knowles's book acted on me like a goad, a stone in the shoe ... The
questing sociologist has an agenda. She is our nominated surrogate
in occupied territory. And she is persistent ... Among the
freakishly perverse bankers and investors, she behaves like Orwell
in Wigan.
*London Review of Books*
Again and again, Knowles's stories attest to a money machine
devoted to nothing but its own perpetuation ... In the tradition of
the great literary walkers, from Walter Benjamin to Will Self, her
insistence on crossing the city on foot is, in an important sense,
an act of resistance, an embrace of urban realities in defiance of
the sad confinement of extreme wealth, its smoked-glass
segregation.
*Times Literary Supplement*
A fascinating investigation of plutocratic London ... as gripping
as a pulp detective novel in which we glimpse the slimy, far from
slummy lives of the morally corrupt. She patrols London's elite
enclaves with a sharp eye for telling social and architectural
details ... Knowles combines cunning and charm.
*New Statesman*
An eye-opening, deeply disturbing, fast-moving journey through the
lives, homes and affairs of the filthy rich of London.
*Danny Dorling*
Fascinating, punchy, thought-provoking. Serious Money exposes the
corrosive impact of London's super rich on our economy, society and
politics, and comprehensively busts the myth that their wealth
trickles down to the rest of us.
*Frances O’Grady*
A wonderful and vital account of a city ruled by, and for, extreme
wealth.
*Anna Minton, author of Big Capital*
Startling, spirited ... Knowles is alert to arresting details ... a
wry primer to the extravagances of the super rich.
*The Critic*
Years of footwork through the streets of central London have gone
into producing this magnificent but disturbing book on the lives
and influence of the super-rich. Knowles writes with enviable
lightness and pace about how money, property, birth, breeding,
contacts, secrecy, parasites and servants have created a class that
owns and milks London, a world away from the city's ordinary
citizens. A powerful ethnography of plutocratic power.
*Professor Ash Amin, author of Seeing Like a City*
An innovative and disturbingly entertaining travelogue covering one
of the most important issues of our time ... could not have been
published at a more critical time.
*LSE Review of Books*
Sociologist Caroline Knowles takes you through the neighborhoods of
the capital city telling stories of how the ultra-wealthy live and
work; how they spend their money, marry and divorce; and why London
is one of the best places for those with nefarious intentions to
hide money from authorities.
*Investopedia - Best Economics Books of 2022*
A guided tour of the spaces and lifestyles of London's super-rich.
Written in an engaging and accessible manner that draws the reader
into spaces and conversations otherwise out of bounds, Knowles
subtly exposes the paradoxes inherent within the life and politics
of the super-rich in London.
*Soundings*
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