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With his pencil thin moustache, gold jewellery and trademark fur coat, Paul Raymond was, for many poeple, the brash personification of nouveau riche vulgarity, posing proudly beside his customised Rolls Royce, a fat cigar protruding from his lips, a curvaceous showgirl on either arm. For other people, Margaret Thatcher among them, he exemplified the entrepreneurial spirit that enabled a poor boy from a single-parent home in Depression-era Liverpool to become Britain's richest man. Right up until he died in March 2008, he was a controversial figure around whom scandal swirled. Paul Willetts, acclaimed biographer of Julian Maclaren-Ross, follows Raymond from his strictly Catholic early life to the isolation, paranoia and extreme wealth of his old age.