In an interview on Financial Speculation

And it presumes a coordinator. Your next book, Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, is also about speculation – but it’s as much about manipulation, isn’t it?

Absolutely. And, slightly atypically for Trollope, it is a book written in a spirit of moral disgust. Trollope generally takes a detached, somewhat comic or ironic view of society. But here we have contempt for the state of Victorian Britain in 1875.

Augustus Melmotte, the tycoon at the centre of the story, is a great character: A mysterious outsider with a bullying, charming, intimidating presence. He promises money and riches to London’s decadent and foppish aristocrats. He is really a speculator in railway bonds, with an American shyster, Hamilton K Fisker, as his partner. Aristocrats crowd on to his boards, as baubles, for the money. You sense an entire class of society wanting to be corrupted, wanting to believe in this man. Melmotte is the precursor of modern figures such as Bob Maxwell and Bernie Madoff, who bully or charm you into believing they have the key to boundless riches.

It's hard to think of another novel about finance that works quite so well.

Other writers have tried to capture the world of high finance, and failed, because finance is abstract and complicated. Trollope succeeded because his real interest was in bringing to life the way that money could change human character. There’s nothing abstract or complicated about greed, vanity and weakness. Tom Wolfe managed something similar a century later with The Bonfire of the Vanities.