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“... This is a stunning book. Overwhelming. It achieves the impossible – combining excellent systematics (without dulling the senses) with natural history, biology, biochemistry, and a wealth of extraordinarily interesting detail. I have no doubt that E.O. Wilson is the most distinguished biologist of our times, but it is surprising, even so, that he not only combines profound knowledge of these ‘little creatures who run the world’ with considerable insight into the future trends of biological thought and progress, but manages to involve us personally in the ant world ...”

“... one of his nieces, was a prime example of the absurdity of that custom. Walter, the second Baron Rothschild, great-great-grandson of the fortune-founding Mayer Amschel, was manifestly without any talent at all for finance, had absolutely no need to earn a living and had a younger brother who possessed in full measure the very abilities in which he was ...”

“... a technical tour de force which ranks him at the top of the class, too, along with Charles Rothschild, who discovered Xenopsylla cheopis in the Sudan in 1901. ‘A grand time up at Shendi some 100m north of Khartoum,’ Rothschild wrote home. ‘We bagged 600 mammals and birds, 500 fleas and a fair lot of Coleoptera ...”

“... to sprout: The shares are a penny and ever so many are                  taken by Rothschild and Baring; And just as a few are allotted to you, you           awake with a shudder despairing. The Lord Chancellor expressed the feelings of many private investors, then and now, who have been victims of market makers, but he was wrong to ...”

“... imagination throughout the 19th century. In James’s The Tragic Muse, the Jewish Cockney actress Miriam Rooth claims to be in the same style as ‘that woman’, and George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth foolishly thinks of herself as destined for stardom because she is more beautiful than the ‘thin Jewess’. Rachel not only dominated the Paris stage but ...”

“... his table-mate Cyril Connolly weeping over an overdone partridge. ‘Stephen laughed. Pauline de Rothschild ate only one pear. W.H. Auden was silent.’ Plante and his partner were smart, pretty, adulatory and new – a shoo-in to the company of elderly gays and needy widows – but the vacancy at the centre of Plante’s ambition is much in evidence. He’s ...”