It was the hair you noticed first, as jumbled as a thicket and as untameable. He liked to say it gave him something of the Medusa. Then the voice, excitedly gabbling about deals or bankers – it was usually one or the other. Then the audience, the huddle that would develop around him, catching the thoughts of a man forever fascinated by his work.
Eventually the circle would part wide enough for a newcomer to be admitted. The flow would pause for them to be welcomed by the centre of attention himself, blinking through glasses and with glass in hand. And so would they complete their introduction to Russell Julius.
|
A gap year studying in Haifa, Israel, was followed by a double first in PPE at Oxford. He had a formidable mind – in later life he would wonder about a switch to academia, but he couldn’t be shut away in libraries and lecture halls. Who would do the deals, for goodness’ sake?
The banking path he chose started as a graduate at NM Rothschild in 1981. Those formative years might have come to be known as a money-grubbing decade in London, but he was firmly rooted in a gentlemanly era of merchant banking.
