LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Philip Green
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Philip Green has been turning a profit from women's clothes for over 40 years. Green was raised in middle-class Croydon and North London, by his father Simon Green, a property developer turned electrical retailer, who died when Green was 12; and by his mother Alma, who owned and ran a launderette chain. Aged eight, Green was sent to a smart Oxfordshire boarding school; at 15, he walked out of it without any qualifications, and launched himself into the business of retailing women's shoes. But it wasn't until he was 33 that Green first struck gold when he sold the Jean Jeanie denim chain for £3 million, having bought it for a paltry £65,000 a year earlier. There followed a succession of ups and downs (highlights: in the late Eighties, under Green, retail concern Amber Day does hideously badly, Green gets ousted by the City; in 1998 he restores his reputation by buying Sears UK and breaking it up for enormous profit; in 1999 he launches his first hostile bid to take over Marks & Spencer, which fails, he'll try it again in 2004, to the chagrin of his former friend Stuart Rose.) In 2002, Green bought Arcadia, which has flourished, essentially under him.
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Philip Green, born in London in 1911, was a prolific composer of film music and a number of other works, including three masses. In 1933 he was the youngest musical director in the West End of London, and was making recordings for EMI at the ripe old age of 22. His first film score was written shortly after the Second World War, and some 150 others followed thereafter. He was one of the most respected and active musicians in his field at the time.
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Of all the things Philip Green has achieved in his career, the single act that best demonstrates his understanding of women is his decision to sign up Kate Moss to design a collection for Topshop. Moss's style is the subject of international fascination. It sometimes seems as if every woman in the 17-47 age bracket is consumed by their exhaustive efforts to channel Moss chic. Green realised he could offer people the tools to do that more effectively, and then talked Moss herself into the scheme.
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The retail entrepreneur Philip Green has banked £1.2bn after awarding himself the biggest pay cheque in British corporate history. The huge dividend has come from the Arcadia fashion business, which has 2,000 outlets and spans high street names including Top Shop, Wallis and Burton. It is more than four times the group's pre-tax profits of £253m.
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Philip Green, owner of, amongst much else, British Home Stores, reached billionaire status faster than anyone else in British history. Today he is worth [pound]3.6 billion and is reckoned to be the country's fourth richest citizen. This is the first biography of a man whose aggressive business tactics and brash lifestyle have transformed the staid image of British retailing, and who is likely to remain in the headlines for as long as his ultimate prize, Marks & Spencer, continues to elude his grasp.. A middle-class Jewish boy from North London who left school at fifteen, Green started and failed with four businesses before he made it with his fifth venture, Jean Jeannie, which he sold to Lee Cooper for an enormous profit that set him on the road to fame and fortune. But there were pitfalls on the way; in particular, his involvement with Amber Day, a public company, left him with an abiding dislike for both the City establishment and outside investors. Ever since, he has relied upon a close group of like-minded entrepreneurs, including Tom Hunter the sports shoe millionaire and the Barclay twins, to help fund his buccaneering forays into Britain's High Streets.
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Distinguishing his own neo-Marxist approach from that of other media scholars, Philip Green pursues two interrelated themes. In the first part of the book, he looks at the strategies Hollywood has employed to deflect or absorb the ideological challenges posed by the feminist critique of contemporary American society. He demonstrates the ways in which mainstream movies and television programs, no matter how unconventional or "subversive" they may appear, produce and reproduce familiar images of sexuality and gender identity. In the second part, Green highlights instances in which reproduction of the dominant ideology is less successful by examining several recent cinematic genres—the female action movie, the rape-revenge cycle, and the new film noir—that portray the real ambiguities of a social order in upheaval.
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Philip Green