“... Henry Raeburn’s ‘John Johnstone, Betty Johnstone and Miss Wedderburn’ (c.1790-95). Emma Rothschild has a written a strange, immensely thoughtful book which at first glance ought to complement Devine’s work. But it does nothing of the sort, attending instead to the history of sensibilities rather than of nations. It is based on the lives and ...”

“... pledging to launch a sale. Once in government, the coalition appointed the financial advisers Rothschild to run a feasibility study. In 2011, the higher education White Paper, Students at the Heart of the System, was bullish about the options. Then there was a hiatus, broken only in December 2013 when Osborne announced that a five-year auction process ...”

“... had a higher scorn for aristocrats than the promiscuous Sir William Beckford, the exceedingly rich Lord Mayor of London who complained to Horace Walpole that the air of Richmond was so bad that 12 of his natural children had died there; to which one can only add that they would have died faster in the West Indies. East of Macaulay’s new town the ducal ...”

“... Peter Brooke each receiving £8049 of public money to assuage their sense of political failure. Lord Waddington stood down as Leader of the House of Lords at the same time, for which he received £12,639, plus (shortly afterwards) the Governorship of Bermuda, at a salary of £63,000 per annum. David Mellor received £8049 when he resigned. Michael Mates ...”

“... had he reversed the order of his verbs, and written what he had acted – as his model and idol, Lord Byron, can be said to have done – he would never have become Prime Minister, the Earl of Beaconsfield, and confidant of the Queen. In poem after poem Byron had revealed the histrionic self-doubt and sense of evil which had goaded him from one extravagant ...”

“... Board, had yet to reach his apotheosis with the life peerage that validated his sobriquet, Lord Toad of Tote Hall. Confidant of Margaret Thatcher, columnist in the News of the World, professional diner-out and social climber, Wyatt spotted his opportunity. His diary would be a secret but was, from the outset, intended for publication. Its rationale was ...”

“... in a letter to Francis Warre-Cornish, another Eton schoolmaster, he wrote of his pupil, the future Lord Rosebery: ‘I would give you a piece of plate if you would get that lad to work; he is one of those who like the palm without the dust.’ Ten years later, Johnson was sacked for fondling one pupil too many and changed his name to Cory. After his ...”

“... race, Awaiting their regained Jerusalem. These little huts, they say, suffice for them. Here Rothschild lives, chief of the tribe abhorr’d Who tried to put to death Our Blessed Lord. But, on the third day, as the Gospel shows, Cheating their machinations, He arose: In whose commemoration, now and then, We persecute ...”

“... ideas for reforming the financing of local governance, encouraged and provoked by their mentor, Lord Rothschild. They were much clearer about what they wanted to escape than what they were trying to achieve. The government was desperate to find an alternative to the rates, which were deeply unpopular with homeowners, who were burdened with a ...”

“... It is easier to show that the old person of Tring who embellished his nose with a ring was not a Rothschild. Like many others, Levi is ready to find real pathos in such supposedly autobiographical nonsense poems as ‘The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo’, ‘The Dong with the Luminous Nose’ and ‘Uncle Arly’, but some of us with blunter sensibilities have grown to ...”

“... the Nobel family was exploiting the large Russian fields around Baku on the Caspian, Alphonse Rothschild was financing its transport to Batum on the Black Sea and its refining and marketing in Europe, and with Marcus Samuel, a London merchant who named his enterprise after his father’s trade – ‘presents from Brighton’, boxes made of shells – was ...”

“... Condition of the Labouring Classes, and local bodies such as the East End Dwellings Society and Lord Rothschild’s Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company. Even at the time it was recognised that the slum-dwellers displaced to make way for these buildings were rarely the tenants who eventually moved into them. This was partly due to the time-lag ...”

“... corpulent Matthew Arnold, was a dandy who enjoyed titles, women in smart attire, the company of a Rothschild, the compliments of Disraeli, the wealth of a Hudson River estate (where in 1883 he went to see Delanos and Astors), and yes, it mattered to him that his famous lecture tour of the United States netted upwards of £1000, since he was perpetually in ...”

“... Green’s, in Living. An Italian girl watches a film in which the star, Algenib, is kissed by Lord Southsea in a smart uniform – and remembers that her own first lover was not English and wore no uniform, and how ashamed she was when she revealed the holes in her stockings as she undressed. ‘Griefstricken because ...”

“... of her death and burial makes it plain that she was not a fully assimilated Jew, like Karl Marx or Lord Beaconsfield. On the other hand, she did not originate what Bryan Cheyette would call a ‘semitic discourse’, though she certainly became the object of one. Disraeli rhapsodised over the ‘semitic principle’ which, he thought, ensured that true Jews ...”