"In the labyrinth of alleyways and dark corridors of the City of London, where almost all the nerves of the world pass through 130,000 offices large and small, you can find a fat little man strolling about, an old-fashioned top hat covering his head with Semitic features [...]. He is a man who, with Deterding, controls oil fields fourteen times richer than all the American fields." This is how a Catalan publication from the late 1930s described Marcus Samuel, one of the key figures in the European oil industry since the end of the 19th century.