THE
SUNDAY
TIMES
BESTSELLERS
GENERAL HARDBACKS
Last
weekWeeks in
top 101
Tired & Tested
Sophie McCartney
(HarperNorth £16.99)
Social media star’s honest account of
the highs and lows of motherhood
(7,995)—12
Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?/Julie Smith
(M Joseph £14.99) Clinical psychologist’s advice
for navigating life’s ups and downs (7,305)153
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse/Charlie
Mackesy (Ebury £16.99) An illustrated
fable containing gentle life philosophy (4,455)3 1224
Manifest/Roxie Nafousi
(M Joseph £14.99) An introduction to the personal
development practice of manifestation (4,060)455
Big Panda and Tiny Dragon/James Norbury
(M Joseph £14.99) Illustrated mindful tale of
friendship inspired by Buddhist philosophy (2,970)5146
What I Wish People Knew About Dementia/Wendy
Mitchell (Bloomsbury £14.99) Dispels myths and
stereotypes of living with dementia (2,015)837
And Away.../Bob Mortimer
(Simon & Schuster £20) The Shooting Stars and
Gone Fishing funnyman’s autobiography (1,985)7218
Bigger Than Us/Fearne Cotton
(Ebury £16.99) Advice on love, communication and
awareness to inspire happiness and hope (1,920)239
Diddly Squat/Jeremy Clarkson
(M Joseph £16.99) Stories of agricultural life from
the broadcaster’s farm in the Cotswolds (1,815)11 1110
Otherlands/Thomas Halliday
(Allen Lane £20) Palaeobiologist’s 500-million-year
journey through Earth’s evolutionary history (1,810)—1GENERAL PAPERBACKS
Last
weekWeeks
in top 101
Atomic Habits
James Clear
(Random House £16.99)
The minuscule changes that can
grow into life-altering outcomes
(3,365)2252
Madhouse at the End of the Earth/Julian Sancton
(WH Allen £9.99) The story of the Belgica’s ill-fated
expedition to the South Pole in 1897 (3,235)—13
Good Vibes, Good Life/Vex King
(Hay House £10.99) How positive thinking, self-love
and overcoming fear lead to lasting happiness (3,135)3 1024
The Complete MAUS/Art Spiegelman
(Penguin £16.99) Cartoonist’s chronicle of his father’s
experience as a Holocaust survivor (2,665)25 15
12 Rules for Life/Jordan B Peterson
(Penguin £10.99) Psychologist’s set of principles
for a responsible and meaningful life (2,425)8276
The Power of Geography/Tim Marshall
(Elliott & Thompson £9.99) A study of ten regions that
could define global politics in the future (2,345)5197
Spoon-Fed/Tim Spector
(Vintage £9.99) Busting common food myths
created by bad science and the food industry (2,340)10 38
Jews Don’t Count/David Baddiel
(TLS £7.99) The comedian and writer on antisemitism’s
absence from the fight against racism (1,995)—19
Breath/James Nestor
(Penguin Life £9.99) An exploration of the lost
art and hidden science of breathing (1,830)1710
The Body Keeps the Score/Bessel van der Kolk
(Penguin £12.99) Understanding psychological trauma
and an alternative approach to healing (1,505)14 9BOOKS
The rise and collapse of the fabulously wealthy Sassoon dynasty
exporter to China by the close
of the 18th century. The family
wasted little time expanding
into China in the 1840s on the
coat-tails of the British, fresh
from their victory over the
Chinese in the First Opium
War of 1839-42. It was opium,
more than anything, that
propelled the Sassoons into
the first rank of international
business from the 1860s to
the end of the century.
Textiles followed and by the
1880s the Sassoons had more
cotton mills in Bombay than
any other company. Tea and
silk, rice and insurance
joined the burgeoning
portfolio. To this the Sassoons
added philanthropy on a
heroic scale.
The Global Merchants is
the engrossing story of the
meteoric rise and calamitous
fall of the Sassoons, and is set
against a backdrop of peak
British imperialism. Born in
Baghdad like so many of his
family, Joseph Sassoon isSassoon and Co.” They were
“the Rothschilds of the East”.
That the Sassoons shot
from provincial obscurity to
international fame and
fortune so swiftly owed much
to the sheikh’s eldest son,
David. After his father died in
1830, he relocated to Bombay
aged 37, where, already fluent
in Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish
and Persian, he threw himself
into trading and learning
Hindustani. He procreated
with equal gusto, fathering
eight sons and six daughters
over the next 39 years, and
creating the foundations of
what would become the
Sassoon business empire.
David was fortunate to
launch his trading venture,
David Sassoon and Co, at a
time when the opium trade
between India and China was
growing rapidly. He was
smart, too, to align himself
closely to the British, whose
East India Company had
become the largest opiumHISTORY
Justin Marozzi
The Global Merchants
The Enterprise and
Extravagance of the Sassoon
Dynasty by Joseph Sassoon
Allen Lane £30 pp448
When Sheikh Sassoon ben
Saleh Sassoon, a Jewish
former chief treasurer to the
pasha of Baghdad, fled the
Iraqi capital in 1830 after
threats to his family, his
immediate prospects in Iran
appeared bleak. No one could
have predicted that within a
generation the Sassoon name
would be synonymous with
one of the greatest commercial
enterprises on earth. In the
words of a competitor, “silver
and gold, silks, gums and
spices, opium and cotton,
wool and wheat — whatever
moves over sea or land feels
the hand or bears the mark of
GETTY IMAGES, ALAMYa history professor at
Georgetown University, and
the author of several books on
the Middle East, including an
acclaimed study of Saddam
Hussein’s Baath Party in Iraq.
David’s eldest sons,
Abdallah and Elias, inherited
their father’s relentless
entrepreneurialism, growingthe company in Bombay and
Shanghai while another
brother, Sassoon David,
launched himself into London,
after his father’s purchase of
Ashley Park, an estate in
Surrey, for the equivalent of
£5 million. Although no one
knew it then, this extravagant
move represented the
beginning of the end.
Over time business started
playing second fiddle tol One book stands out from
the general hardbacks pack
of the usual celebrity
memoirs and self-help books:
Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands.
Palaeobiology isn’t usually a
guaranteed bestseller, but
this journey through our
prehistoric Earth has
generated mass appeal.
Dare we hope that James
McConnachie’s rave review
in these pages, in which he
placed a very early bet on it
as his book of the year, might
have something to do with
the rankings?
The lists are prepared by and
the data is supplied by (and
copyrighted to) Nielsen BookScan,
and are taken from the TCM for
the week ending 05/02/22.
Figures shown are sales for
the seven-day period.
‘Dirty trading’ The Opium
Wars; right, Reuben SassoonEmperors of opium
24 13 February 2022