The life of Paul Ramsay shows that business people don’t have to be ruthless to succeed. Many will find this hard to credit but, on the evidence here, they don’t even have to be super-smart, highly educated, or single-minded either. As Angela Shanahan’s charming and thoughtful biography makes clear, Ramsay’s business life was a kind of proof-of-concept for Dale Carnegie’s dictum that ‘if you do the right thing by others, they’ll (mostly) do the right thing by you’.