Bunhill: Words on Lloyds

QUITE a little cottage industry is developing in Lloyd's of London books. Two more have landed on Bunhill's desk this week. Ultimate Risk: The Inside Story of the Lloyd's Catastrophe comes to us from Adam Raphael, a writer on the Economist and former executive editor of the Observer. Raphael's tale is, indeed an inside story. An investor on three of the worst affected syndicates, he faces serious losses and is a leading light in some of the action groups conducting legal action against Lloyd's.

With Significant Loss, former Sunday Times journalist David Brierley takes a very different tack. He has written a novel based on Lloyd's with an outsider's view. 'I am not a Name. None of my friends or family are either,' he says.

The Lloyd's chairman Stephen Grote does not come out of things at all well. He is arrested and charged with theft, fraud and false accounting. And by the final paragraph, he is found dead in his Zurich home after suffering a heart attack following surgery.