Moneyed men who make the world go round

A friend was once at the same swanky Upper East Side eaterie where the much-married Revlon gazillionaire Ron Perelman was having lunch with his children. A more cheerless sight it would be hard to find, apparently: the infinitely wealthy (and gloomy) Perelman contemplating the cost of his next yacht, perhaps, and the children dreading the prospect of yet another mother to have to get to know. (However much you might not want to have lunch with him, Perelman does deserve respect for once being married to the actress Ellen Barkin, of whom it was said she had the kind of body that would make a dead man dance.)

Anyway, Perelman is a minor but not unrepresentative figure in David Rothkopf's rollicking jaunt through the ranks of the global power elites. Rothkopf has identified 6,000 people - from New York to London, Santiago to Sydney, Beijing to Bombay

- who effectively rule the world. (It's a speciality of Rothkopf's; he has served his time as an international 'consultant'.)

One day hobnobbing with political honchos in Gleneagles, the next sharing a cheese fondue with a Nobel laureate in Davos, or a Georgian meal with a Soviet oligarch in Moscow, Rothkopf has totted up the air miles to bring us close to these guys (and they are almost all guys).

The men who run the world are, he argues, an alliance of the political, the financial, the military, media barons and energy moguls, ­ many of them operating, in their own globalised interests, outside the constraints of national and international regulation.

And the richer these outlaws get, the more glaring and offensive does the disparity between their wealth and that of the man in the street become; one reason, perhaps, why the Ministry of Defence last year speculated about the possibility of Britain's middle-classes turning into Marxist revolutionaries.

Thank heavens, though, the book is not preachy. Lord, no: Rothkopf is keen