FT & Economist

Overview

This page covers the Financial Times and Economist groups, in which Pearson has a predominant stake.

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The FT

The Financial Times: A Centenary History (London: Viking 1988) by David Kynaston is the official history of the Pearson-controlled London financial paper, which owns half of The Economist group.

Andrew Boyle's acidulous Poor Dear Brendan: The Quest For Brendan Bracken (London: Hutchinson 1974) leaves little sense of how the 'bounder' and supposed Churchill love-child could have become chair of both the Economist and the Financial Times. Bracken's more perceptively analysed in the spritzy Eminent Churchillians by Andrew Roberts (London: Phoenix 1995) and - with less verve - in Charles Lysaght's Brendan Bracken (London: Allen Lane 1979), which alas omits Claud Cockburn's sniff that Bracken was "a man so devious, even his natural hair looked like a wig".

Richard Cockett edited My Dear Max: The Letters of Brendan Bracken to Lord Beaverbrook 1925-58 (London: Rainbow 1990). The milieu's discussed in the second volume of Stephen Koss' exemplary The Rise & Fall of the Political Press in Britain (London: Hamish Hamilton 1984).

For Pearson see the separate profile on this site.

Economist

The Economist Group, owned by the Financial Times and Pearson, encompasses The Economist - still somewhat quaintly described as a weekly newspaper - and a growing range of specialist publications and information research services.

The outstanding study of the corporate flagship is Ruth Edwards' The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist, 1843-1993 (London: Hamish Hamilton 1993).