The Sassoons

This is the biography of a family known as the "Rothschilds of the East". Bankers to successive Ottoman rulers and leading citizens in Baghdad for centuries, they accumulated a fortune. The first Sassoon to wear Eastern dress arrived in England in 1858. Within a few years the family boasted two baronetcies and was sending its sons to Eton and Oxford. The Shah of Persia and later King Edward VII were to be guests in the Sassoon homes and hunting lodges. A Sassoon woman simultaneously owned and edited the "Sunday Times" and the "Observer". Sir Philip Sassoon, millionaire host, politician and aesthete, was private secretary to Field Marshal Haig and Lloyd George. His cousin Siegfried was the war poet.