Lead Review

• Book: The Fear Index
• Location: Geneva
• Author: Robert Harris

In a few deft descriptions of a few short hours, Harris sketches the picture of a lonely, brilliant intellectual for whom money was “a sort of toxic by-product of his research”. He notes the Hoffmann villa in Geneva – quietly bourgeois on the outside, dismally luxurious and over-bedroomed within. He observes exactly the offshoot effects of wealth, such as the Swiss policeman who has had to move next door to France and drive across the border to work each day because his own country has become too expensive to live in…… Harris sees the humour, poignancy and tragedy in all this: I would have liked more of it. (Charles Moore, the Telegraph)

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