Great Irish storyteller who won three Whitbread Prizes
William Trevor, who has died aged 88, was an Irish-born writer whose beautifully crafted, elegantly understated stories and novels about the travails of unremarkable people “placed him in the company of such masters as V.S. Pritchett, W. Somerset Maugham and Chekhov”, said The New York Times. Melancholic, stark and sometimes darkly funny, his plots tend to unfold in small Irish or English villages, and feature people struggling on the lower rungs of life. “I’m very interested in the sadness of fate,” he said, “the things that just happen to people.” Yet his cast “was extraordinarily varied”. As the critic Ted Solotaroff wrote in 1982: “His farmers and priests and men of the turf are as convincing and suggestive as his Hampstead aesthetes, his suburban swingers, his old-boy homosexuals, his mod clerks and shop girls. Nothing seems alien to him; he captures the moral atmosphere of a sleek advertising agency, of a shabby West End dance hall, of a minor public school, of a shotgun wedding in an Irish pub.”
William Trevor Cox was born in County Cork, the son of a Protestant bank manager who moved his family from town to town. As “an outsider by family circumstance and religion”, he learned, at an early age, to observe life with a watchful eye. “I was fortunate that my accident of birth placed me on the edge of things,” he once said. As a teenager, he took up sculpting in wood, and after graduating from Trinity College Dublin, he moved to England to work as an art teacher while also making wood carvings for churches. He then began sculpting full time, embracing abstraction. But by the late 1950s, he’d started to regret the lack of people in his work. Moving to London, he took a job in advertising, and wrote in his spare time. (He later changed his name to disassociate his writing from his sculpture.) His first book came out in 1958, but it was not a success, and he disowned it. It was his second, The Old Boys (1964), that made his name. His first short story collection, The Day We Got Drunk on Cake, was published in 1967. Over the years, he dedicated book after book to his wife, Jane, said Peter Porter in The Guardian. They had met at Trinity – the “most important event” in his life – and had two sons.
Settling with his family in Devon, Trevor went on to write nearly 20 more novels, including the creepy The Children of Dynmouth (1976), Felicia’s Journey (1994) and The Story of Lucy Gault (2002). However, he insisted he was really a short-story writer “who writes novels when he can’t get them into short stories”. He was, he said, fascinated by people. “Each character is somebody that I know very well – as well as I know myself… You become very interested in that person. I’m sort of a predator, an invader of people.” His many awards included an honorary knighthood; he won three Whitbread Prizes; and was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. In 2009, Robert Cooper, who adapted several of his stories for radio, wrote: “I shall always imagine him, diffident and comfortable in tweeds, arriving in a tranquil, well-ordered and beautiful place full of nice-looking people, and thinking: ‘This looks lovely – I bet it isn’t.’”
It’s the end of an era at Goldman Sachs, said The Wall Street Journal. Michael “Woody” Sherwood, a 30-year Goldman veteran who “played a key role” in pushing the investment bank’s growth in Europe and emerging markets, is to quit. He’ll be entrusting the reins of Goldman Sachs International (GSI) – which he built up from a “tiny, loss-making entity” to a business contributing more than a quarter of Goldman’s total income – to his current co-chief, Richard Gnodde. The move comes little more than five months after Sherwood was grilled by MPS over Goldman’s involvement in the BHS scandal.
Sherwood’s departure “will be greeted with mixed emotions”, said Alex Brummer in the Daily Mail. A Briton who once described himself as “the most senior non-american in the firm”, he can take credit for being “one of the architects of Goldman’s great leap forward in Europe and a big contributor to the City’s pre-eminence as a financial centre”. Yet, on the debit side, he “failed to protect Goldman from the ethical pratfalls which have sullied its reputation”. These range from involvement in the Greek debt crisis (Goldman was accused of having previously helped the Greek government hide billions in debts), to the bank’s “unfortunate” informal advice to Sir Philip Green on the sale of BHS for £1 to a serial bankrupt.
Sherwood, who earned $21m last year, says there is no connection between his decision to quit and what he calls the BHS “blip”. But it’s certainly a blot on his résumé, said Jonathan Guthrie in the FT. Having dodged several “explosive financial bullets” over the course of an illustrious career, one of the UK’S best-known bankers will leave “with what amounts to a slap in the face with a wet fish”.