Five books to cheer you up this summer

Merryn Somerset Webb picks five books for those people who think everything is just awful these days.

180713-books

Cheer up. Things really aren't that bad.
(Image credit: 2015 THANASIS ZOVOILIS)

I'm going to try and cheer you up. Mostly with statistics. The first useful set comes from the Office for National Statistics and is particularly relevant to MoneyWeek readers. It turns out that being miserable or having poor "personal wellbeing" is fairly strongly correlated with age, and with middle age in particular.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.