Question: why, if almost half of us now use cash only a few times a year, are high-denomination banknotes being printed in increasingly large numbers? In April 2024, the value of all the dollar bills in circulation reached an all-time high of $2.345tn, and may well be even more than that by now. The total value of dollars in the world has doubled every decade since the 1970s. Similarly, there are 1.552tn euro notes in circulation, while most other currencies – the British pound, the Japanese yen, the Swiss franc and so on – are all at something like their highest levels in history. This at a time when so many of us have pretty much stopped using cash altogether, and even the people who sell the Big Issue in our streets are equipped with card readers.

When I talk about “us”, I mean those who don’t have to worry about hiding huge cash profits from drug dealing, people-smuggling and so on. And that of course provides the answer to the question: while law-abiding citizens like you and I have to jump through hoops when we move even relatively small sums around for entirely legitimate reasons – buying a fridge or a secondhand car, say – drug dealers just shove bundles of the stuff into their coat pockets or suitcases and whisk them round the world in order to keep their business going. The number of dogs trained to sniff out cash at international airports is growing, but nothing like as fast as the rate at which big-denomination notes are being pumped out by the world’s central banks. And the ways in which money is laundered are growing in complexity and sophistication.

“Money laundering”, by the way, is an expression that started in 1920s Chicago, when Al Capone and his friends had to cope with this same problem: what to do with their vast bundles of greenbacks. They created or co-opted chains of laundries and other small shops to disguise the profits from bootlegging, then bought high-value items such as houses and entire companies (not to mention cops and politicians) with the cash that had been washed clean; “laundering” was a witty way of describing the process. Nowadays the number of men’s barber shops that have sprung up in Britain’s towns and cities may well hint at a new version of the process; though the salivating reporters from the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, hoping to link the Middle Eastern haircut with people-smuggling, drug dealing, immigration and the rise of “lawless” Britain, never quite managed to prove the case. That doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t one, of course.

Oliver Bullough is one of Britain’s finest investigative reporters. He is thorough, his sources are impressive, and he has a lovely, easy style which takes us through some of the darkest features of the world’s economy. He also has a fine sense of moral purpose, which puts his reporting on to a different level from the show-and-tell paperbacks that fill airport bookshop shelves. As his excellent books from the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse (plus his reporting for Reuters from Chechnya, the scariest war of modern times) showed, he seems to be completely without fear. In the nasty, complex business of reporting international money-laundering, courage is perhaps the most important quality.

Everybody Loves Our Dollars is a much-needed exposé. It starts off in the unlikeliest of settings: Bicester Village, the fashion outlet near Oxford which is built along the lines of a twee New England town; except that the shops bear the names of the world’s most famous fashion brands, from Jimmy Choo to Stella McCartney, Givenchy, Louis Vuitton and Gucci – and the prices are low, low, low. You get there by train from Marylebone in London, and the announcements en route show you who the target clientele is: “We are now approaching Bicester Village,” say recorded voices in Arabic and Mandarin Chinese. People get off with excited smiles, then others struggle on board carrying vast amounts of high-end shopping, often packed into one final purchase: an expensive suitcase that will take everything home to Bahrain or Chongqing.

Bullough maintains that this display of shopaholicism is a major form of money laundering in its own right. You can move large amounts of money around by buying expensive things. As a senior police officer tells him: “Factories in China ship drugs to British gangsters, who then give the payments in cash to Chinese students studying at UK universities. The students either take the cash to Bicester Village, or first pay it into their bank accounts before going; then they buy Gucci handbags or whatever, and ship them back to China.”

Bicester Village was perhaps the least exotic of the places Bullough visited for this book: others include the Marshall Islands, the Northern Marianas and Fort Worth, Texas, where the US Federal Reserve’s Western Currency Facility pumps out unthinkable amounts of $100 bills every day. Which of course leads us back to the question of why, when the demand for paper money is shrinking hugely in the west, are western central banks pumping out more? The answer is depressing. According to one estimate, 70% of all the $100 bills in existence circulate outside the US. The monetary value of each banknote, which only costs a few pence to print, is in effect loaned to the people who take them out of their banks or ATMs. The US Federal Reserve, Bullough writes, earns tens of billions of dollars from this arrangement. It’s an enormous profit, and the big central banks of the world simply aren’t prepared to relinquish it – no matter what the results.

And the results are, of course, appalling. In Mexico, which takes in something like $25bn in US banknotes per year, drug violence kills about 150 people every day. Since 2006, when the Mexican government started using the army to clamp down on the drug cartels, getting on for half a million people have been murdered. Among them was the husband of a woman I interviewed in Ciudad Juárez, a key drugs-trading city just across the border from El Paso. He had been an investigative journalist, like Bullough. After he revealed some of the local cartel’s secrets, he was murdered. The killers cut his head off and stuck it on the railings outside his front door; his young son found it when he came home from school.

This is just one minuscule part of the price the world pays for the profits of the central banks. We have long since lost the war against drugs. Now we’re losing the war against money laundering; the profits for our governments are just too big. The price is paid by people such as the widow of the Mexican investigative journalist in Ciudad Juárez. “I wiped the blood off his dead face and kissed his lips,” she told me. “I’ve never had a proper night’s sleep since that moment.” It’s a very heavy price to pay for a designer handbag.

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and his wife, Jools, have paid themselves £2.5m in dividends for the second year in a row as pre-tax profits at their core media and restaurant empire slumped.

Pre-tax profits at Jamie Oliver Holdings (JOH) fell by £1m to £2.4m last year. This was despite a 6% rise in sales to £28.6m, helped by a surge in restaurant income after the November 2023 opening of his first directly run restaurant since the collapse of his empire of 22 Jamie’s Italian UK outlets in 2019.

JOH includes Oliver’s media interests, such as TV production, books, endorsements, his cookery school and restaurant, as well as franchise income from the overseas restaurants that still bear his name, fees for promoting the supermarket Tesco, and royalties from products bearing his name.

His latest book, Eat Yourself Healthy, is currently the UK’s bestselling cookery book, and the chef is also involved in charitable efforts with his Ministry of Food foundation now teaching cooking in 1,150 secondary schools.

The group, which became a certified B Corp in 2019 in recognition of its ethical efforts, was run by chief executive Kevin Styles for more than two years until December last year. No replacement has been appointed and the company is now run by its operating board.

The dividends relate to the family’s wider interests, which also include a further licensing business for which detailed accounts are not available.

Income from directly owned and operated restaurants jumped to £3.6m in 2024, from £335,983 in 2023, while franchise income from overseas restaurants including Jamie’s Italian and Jamie’s Deli, rose to £3.8m from £3.6m.

That was despite a tough environment for the hospitality industry in recent years amid rising costs and a shift away from dining out as households try to deal with high bills including for energy and groceries.

Sales at the chef’s cookery school also remained steady at about £1m before the opening of a new school inside John Lewis’s Oxford Street store earlier this year.

However, income from royalties, endorsements, licences and TV production fell by 10% to £19.8m – falling back after a major deal with Tesco in 2023 ended last year.

A spokesperson for the Jamie Oliver group said it was opening 12 new restaurants internationally this year, including the first outlets in Oman and Greece, and had tripled its capacity for the cookery school with the John Lewis opening, which was performing ahead of target.

John Lewis has said it wants to open more cookery schools with Oliver, but no firm plans have been announced.

A few months after the death of the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks in 2015, I visited his office in midtown Manhattan to pass on my condolences to his friend and longtime editor Kate Edgar. Shelves were stacked with editions of every translation of Sacks’s books; piled on every surface were reams of yellow paper covered in Sacks’s barely legible scrawl. The subjects were as eclectic as his enthusiasms: two towering piles were marked “Dreams” and “Memory”, and another was marked “Borges”. There was more than enough material for at least two more books of essays, Edgar told me (The River of Consciousness would be published in 2017, and Everything in Its Place in 2019), and then, gesturing to some of the piles around her, intimated the scale of another task: sorting through 70 large boxes of correspondence.

From the riches of those boxes, Edgar has now distilled 700 pages of absorbing, illuminating, moving and entertaining letters for publication. They range from August 1960 (when Sacks first moved from England to North America), through to a few days before his death in New York, from melanoma, 55 years later.

Sacks qualified in medicine in England in the 1950s and, after his internship, began training as a neurologist in California in 1961. The US offered “enormous opportunities, not merely professionally, but for leading a full and fascinating life in many other ways”, he wrote home. He came from a family of medics: his father, Samuel Sacks, practised as a London GP well into his 90s, while his mother, Muriel Elsie Landau, was a distinguished gynaecologist. She looms large throughout this collection: “My mother was not only the first Jewish woman (and almost the first woman) to be elected a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons,” Sacks later wrote, “[but] one of the very few Jewish consultants in the whole of England.” One letter reveals how she would occasionally bring home “deformed foetuses” from hospital and ask the 10-year-old Oliver to dissect them. He had a traumatic childhood: he was evacuated to a sadistic residential school during the war, and his letters often return to the horror of that abandonment. His memoir On the Move (2015) describes how his mother abandoned him twice over when, at 18, he admitted his homosexuality. “You are an abomination!” Sacks remembered her saying. “I wish you had never been born.”

But the loving early letters Sacks wrote to both parents are among the jewels of this collection, detailing his anxieties about medicine (citing a temporary “aversion to patients, sickness, hospitals and particularly doctors”), his weightlifting escapades (he was the joint Californian squat champion), and his accounts of motorbiking through the desert, high on amphetamines, and using a stethoscope to siphon stolen petrol.

Even in his 20s, Sacks wrote in a learned, stylish and energetic prose. But it’s after his move to New York in 1965 that the compassionate physician of later fame appears. He began with neuropathology (but confessed “poring down a microscope drives me nuts, and I need some return to clinical work”), then took on a job in a headache clinic – material from which would become his first book, Migraine (1970). Then, as a resident neurologist at Beth Abraham, a hospital for chronic neurological disease, he found his vocation, as devoted physician to patients with a severe form of Parkinson’s disease (encephalitis lethargica), all of whom had been institutionalised since the “sleepy sickness” epidemic of the 1920s. A new medication, L-dopa, was just becoming available, and in his groundbreaking Awakenings (1973) Sacks charted its spectacular effects. The book later inspired a play by Harold Pinter and a Hollywood movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. In the early 80s, a young editor called Kate Edgar was assigned to edit a book of his neurological case histories that would later become The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), the title chosen by his then editor at the London Review of Books, Mary-Kay Wilmers.

A letter from Sacks to Edgar asking her to stay on working for him is among the most touching in the book: he wonders “whether we might make some sort of private arrangement between us, my retaining you as – I can think of no term general enough! – but as some sort of literary/intellectual factotum, inciting, organising, typing, editing… odd pieces, case histories, essays, lectures, etc”. It comes two-thirds of the way through Letters, when Sacks is 53; Hat (as he called it) propelled him to the bestseller lists and international fame.

Sacks wrote of Edgar as his “mother figure”, adding that he did his best work when she was in the next room. His many subsequent books – Seeing Voices, Uncle Tungsten, Musicophilia, Hallucinations, among others – are testament to a successful partnership. By the end of his life, his correspondents included his many fans around the world (in my loft at home I have a kind response he sent me in 1997), as well as poets, artists and scientists. The prose shifts gradually in tone as he was called upon to take up the role of public intellectual, but his restless curiosity, breadth of interests, and the energy of his enthusiasm never wanes, even when responding to his critics. His reply to a psychiatrist, Orrin Palmer, who in 1988 wrote to complain of Sacks’s characterisation of Tourette syndrome, reads: “I have a profound respect for Affliction, and the Afflicted – this is at the heart of my physicianhood and personhood… While I fully respect the medical model – and my own writings (Migraine etc) are examples of it – I think that one must go BEYOND it.” Sacks showed generations of doctors (and patients) how medicine is just the starting point for an exploration of the possibilities of being human. With these letters, his legacy as an extraordinary writer, humanitarian and physician is secured.

Gavin Francis is a GP in Edinburgh. His book The Bridge Between Worlds: A Brief History of Connection is out now