Tom Bower Audiobooks

Nobody commissions Tom Bower for a flattering portrait, as Revenge and Betrayal attest

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Who is Tom Bower?

Tom Bower, born in 1946, is a British writer and former BBC journalist and television producer who has made a career of the unauthorised biography: the kind written without the subject’s blessing, about people well equipped to object. His targets have included Robert Maxwell, Mohamed Al-Fayed, Conrad Black, Richard Branson, Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson – business tycoons, press barons and politicians who did not get to approve the manuscript.

The investigative pedigree is real rather than performed. Broken Dreams, his study of vanity, greed and the souring of British football, won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year in 2003. Nobody hires Tom Bower to flatter them, which is rather the point.

Tom Bower in audiobooks

Investigative non-fiction becomes compulsive listening when the reporting is solid, and Bower’s stock-in-trade – power, money and the distance between public image and private conduct – gives a narrator plenty to work with. He appears in our catalogue with Revenge and Betrayal, two titles blunt enough to serve as a mission statement for his entire shelf.

For UK listeners these are dispatches from our own public life, delivered by a journalist constitutionally incapable of deference. Listen with the understanding that unauthorised means precisely that: no approved version, no soft edges, no permission sought.