Many politicians use their memoirs to settle old scores. Newspapers scour them for juicy titbits of who said what to whom, and which leaders were perpetually drunk or unreliable. Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister, is above such gossip. His first post-election effort is an analysis of the financial crisis that dominated his premiership. ' But "Beyond the Crash" is no less revealing for the absence of tittle-tattle. The tone is set in the four-page prologue which contains 34 instances of the words "I", "me" or "my". Later on, readers are told of several occasions when an anecdote by Mr Brown would reduce global leaders to silence or a speech would provoke rounds of applause from audiences.
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