Fourth Estate
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1994
Copyright © Tim Jackson 1994, 1995
Tim Jackson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006382676
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008240646
Version: 2017-01-05
For Emily Marbach
CONTENTS
2 One Per Cent of Tubular Bells
5 Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?
8 ‘Too Liberal a Use of the Lawyers’
9 The Little Boys and Their Boats
12 ‘I’ve Got to Believe You’re Serious about It’
15 Recovery in Woodstock Street
17 Branson Succumbs to Takeover Fever
18 Loos, Booze and Upper Class
21 How John Thornton Earned His $3m
23 Heathrow Airport and the Slot Machine
RICHARD BRANSON is Britain’s best-known entrepreneur, but it is not for his business activities that he is famous. Branson first achieved celebrity with his 1985 attempt on the Transatlantic sea speed record. Since then, he has ballooned across the Atlantic and the Pacific; spent an unhappy year at the helm of a Conservative government campaign to clean up the environment; launched a new brand of condoms in the hope of encouraging young people to have safer sex; and made a bid to run Britain’s National Lottery, which was unsuccessful despite his promise to give away all his profits to charity.
Even when it is his business