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“... the value of land; but because land was so valuable even aristocrats with relatively few acres – Lord Byron, for example – were asset rich. The wealth of the wealthiest was fabulous. The duke of Sutherland, who died in 1833, left a million excluding land. Since he owned one and a half million acres, he was worth at least seven times that amount. He was ...”

“... On the other hand, John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of me Defence Staff that I’d met the first Duke of Wellington. 15 March 1994. A reply ...”

“... with the Egyptian ambassador’. Churchill’s publicity machine was often wildly insecure. When Lord Halifax was sent off as ambassador to the US, bogus baggage was placed on the Port Jackson at Liverpool to fool the Germans, and when it turned out that the Port Jackson wasn’t going to America, the baggage was transferred to the Warwick ...”

“... Britain most at risk of a French-style revolution of its own? In a controversial book, George III, Lord North and the People (1949), Herbert Butterfield argued that this moment came a decade before the French Revolution, in 1779-80. These years witnessed a movement for parliamentary reform and a popular clamour against Catholic relief, which culminated in the ...”

“... by insisting on the intervention of the American architect John Russell Pope in 1929 the sponsor, Lord Duveen of Millbank, was promoting, against the inclinations of British curators and civil servants, the ‘latest American style’, the style of the new sculpture gallery in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Pope was subsequently chosen as the architect ...”

“... bore’ or ‘amusing’ or ‘bogus’. The exception to the misrule in Vile Bodies is Father Rothschild: he is what Decline and Fall conspicuously lacks, a commentator on the novel in which he appears, and although one character dismisses him as ‘that charlatan of a Jesuit’, Waugh’s own attitude seems a good deal more respectful. At any rate, ...”

“... Our ‘flying men’, it seems, did nothing to enhance property values on the Chiltern slopes. The Rothschild estate of Halton was ‘transformed into a vast camp of hutments, which played sad havoc with the beauty of the hillside towards Tring, and this has developed into one of the principal depots of the Royal Air Force.’ Not far away, Hillingdon House ...”

“... dealt a ‘decisive blow … to the unhurried “gentlemanly” style of business’, as Edmund de Rothschild put it. Warburg himself later claimed that he disliked the whole episode and would have preferred a friendly deal. But there can be no doubt that the rapid increase of the bank’s business dated from the moment he showed he was able to take on the ...”

“... are few, and overshadowed by its villains. Disraeli’s novels glorified Nathan and Lionel de Rothschild as the Sidonias, father and son – the one a great Jewish financier who rescues kings and princes and saves civilisation, the other a paladin who combines the wealth of Croesus, the wisdom of Solomon and the beauty of Byron. But their glamour is ...”

“... The mythology of the Titanic seems to have been pretty cigar-ridden, even before the poem. Lord’s A Night to Remember reveals that the ship’s Captain allowed you in the room only if you were so still that the blue cloud didn’t move (‘firmness and urbanity’). From Ragtime we learn that the ship’s principal owner, J.P. Morgan, was portrayed ...”

“... as the ‘Laughing Cavalier’, more famous than any other picture by him. The contest between Lord Hertford and Baron James de Rothschild to buy it at the Pourtalès sale in 1865 made it even more so. But it is sobering to realise that the Dead Orlando, a picture of the youthful warrior in black silk, lying dead ...”

“... be unpretentious, we liked to imagine – in fact, we still imagine – that Albertine is Guy de Rothschild and that I’m Marie-Hélène, his wife: fantasy escape from life at the firm.) One time, Albertine told me (one of her more amusing revelations), she turned in an essay by Montaigne as a seminar paper. Her professor – very kind – simply handed the ...”

“... London, where she sat between Marina Warner (in yellow satin hotpants and a heart-shaped bib) and Lord Snowdon. She won and managed not to get expelled, but was in trouble with the family for turning her wicked stepmother into a ‘beautiful milkmaid’ in her winning essay. ‘You went to fucking public school, didn’t you?’ another girl said to her when ...”

“... But de Pougy wouldn’t give up her male clients, who included the Prince of Wales and Maurice de Rothschild. ‘I still need 800,000 francs before I can stop,’ she wrote. ‘Then I shall cable you: “Come take me.”’Albert Barney, Natalie’s alcoholic and violent father, whose fortune came from the family business manufacturing railway cars, was ...”

“... French vignerons, who had grown financially dependent on his quality assessments. Parker is now ‘Lord of the Grapes’: Time magazine announced that ‘for countless wine lovers, Robert Parker’s tastes are infallible’; the Economist wrote that ‘Mr Parker’s palate is thought to be the oenological equivalent of Einstein’s brain’; and the Atlantic ...”