Money talks

“I started scheming. If I got somebody to knock me o , death by misadventure,

[my children] would get the insurance… I wanted them to have a life. It was a hard moment… I literally thought of self-annihilation so they could survive.That’s how low I was…The light at the end of the tunnel was Breaking Bad.” American actor Giancarlo Esposito (pictured) on being near-bankrupt in 2008 and considering arranging his own murder so his children could collect the life insurance, quoted in Variety. A year later he was cast in the TV show Breaking Bad, which became a huge hit

“The problem with progressive politics is very often that the radical people aren’t sensible, and the sensible people aren’t radical.” Tony Blair, quoted in The Times

“It’s the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.” Essayist and critic Logan Pearsall Smith, quoted on The Knowledge

“I was working a lot on TV and then I landed two adverts… and they paid ridiculously well. I frittered it all on clothes. I went to Donna Karan – the proper posh shop, not DKNY – in Bond Street and bought a coat for £300… I’m a spender. I hate meanness. My attitude is that, if the money’s there, spend it.”

“[No one] missed a meal, nobody didn’t send their children to university… I don’t think that anyone in this whole story is guilty of much more than greed and ambition… I don’t think any good business happens without ambition and I think greed is a natural human state. I’d feel a lot more guilt if I had been drink-driving or if I’d been selling drugs and someone had died.” Inigo Philbrick,who committed the biggest art fraud in US history, quoted in The Sunday Times