Just after 8.30am on a cold December day in 1994, in a 17th-floor London office overlooking the Thames, Frank Barlow smiled his Cheshire-cat smile, poured coffee from a silver pot, added milk, and passed the bone-china cup and saucer to his guest. Barlow then leant over with a silver spoon and stirred it for him. The guest, a Management Today magazine writer, later said: “I took it from this that he was someone who liked things to be done just so.”
Short and bespectacled, Barlow led the conversion of the Financial Times into computerised production and developed the FT’s parent company, Pearson, from a disparate collection of family businesses into a focused media and entertainment group. “He was a tough little bugger,” a colleague