Life of a high-flyer who crashed and soared deserves our attention

READING a biography of someone you met many times both professionally and socially is an interesting experience. Will the book reveal things about its subject that you didn’t know?

Does it reflect accurately the personality that you encountered? Does it include the most relevant stories of his or her life? The English historian Richard Aldous has produced an authorised biography on the life of businessman Tony Ryan, who died in 2007. Ryan was an extraordinarily successful businessman: he founded not one but two exceptional aviation companies, one in organising the supply of aircraft to airlines, the other in breaking a State-sponsored monopoly to create one of the most successful commercial airlines in Europe. He became exceedingly rich, lost most of it, then became exceptionally rich again.

As a business journalist I encountered Ryan most during the period of the decline of the first company, the Shannon-based aviation leasing company GPA, his seemingly fallow years after its effective collapse and takeover by the giant US General Electric, and the growth of Ryanair that led to it joining the stock market. I saw him in his pomp, reported on his fall and witnessed on occasions how he coped with it before soaring again.