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Barbarians at the GateBook

by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar

Who uses, recommends or left Barbarians at the Gate, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Robin Wigglesworth
Robin Wigglesworth is the editor of the Financial Times blog Alphaville, a host of the podcast “The Story of Money” and the author of the forthcoming book “A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World.”
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Um, I think the obvious first place, the first book is is Barbarians at the Gate. I I genuinely think it's kind of the gold standard of of narrative business journalism today, but really it's kind of like um a history of American business over the past century told through the prism of this private equity deal and all the crazy characters involved. It is astonishing.

Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “Trump vs. the Bond Market” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/28/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-robin-wigglesworth.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.

2026-08-28·youtube.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.