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Anthony Sampson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Anthony Terrell Seward Sampson (3 August 1926 – 18 December 2004) was a British writer; he was also a founding member of the (defunct) Social Democratic Party (SDP) . During the 1950s he edited the magazine Drum in Johannesburg, South Africa. On returning to the United Kingdom he began a series of major books with Anatomy of Britain (1963). His main themes were how Britain works as a state, and large corporations.
Among his other noted works:
- The New Europeans (1968)
- The Sovereign State of ITT (1973)
- The Seven Sisters (a study of the international oil industry) (1975)
- The Arms Bazaar (a study of the international arms trade) (1977)
- The Money Lenders (a study of international banking) (1981)
- Black Gold (about the crumbling of apartheid and the business/financial picture in South Africa) (1987)
- Company Man (a study of corporate life) (1995)
- Mandela: The Authorised Biography (1999), winner of the Alan Paton Award
- Who Runs This Place?: The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century (2004)
As that list indicates, he took an interest in broad political and economic power structure. But what a mere list cannot convey is that Sampson saw power as personal, so his books often read like series of interlocked biographies — of arms merchants, oil company executives, etc., according to the theme of each. He was a biographer and personal friend of Nelson Mandela.
Furthermore, the personal was for Sampson also the psychological, even the psychoanalytical, as this passage from The Money Lenders shows:
"[Bankers] seem specially conscious of time, always aware that time is money. There is always a sense of restraint and tension. (Is it part of the connection which Freud observed between compulsive neatness, anal eroticism, and interest in money?)"