Alan Sugar comes across in his autobiography, What You See Is What You Get, as a no-nonsense business man who is so full of his sense of achievement that he even retells the inaccuracies about him that the tabloids loved to print. The persona that comes across in the hit BBC TV show The Apprentice – You’re Fired – the gruff, grumpy Sir Alan now Lord Sugar, keeps popping up across the almost 600 pages of this big read of a book, that is almost swamped by too much detail about the equipment he sold to become an Amstrad millionaire.

The book falls into four sections, his early life as the poor Jewish kid who overcame prejudice in school to start from rags to riches selling kindling for the fire, door to door, as well as printing and selling a school magazine and getting into photography as well. We get a very detailed section about the move from selling cigarette lighters to computers and while this is a great read about ambition and business lessons learned, it is bogged down with the knobs and gibbons of electrical goods.