“... 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 ...”

“... and Hatton Garden in London. The savvy of London financiers and huge loans from Nathaniel Rothschild were vital to the company’s success. Rhodes had an intuitive sense of whom to buy out and when, but this touch failed him when a gold rush began at the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal. He complained he could not ‘see’ the gold capriciously ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... And how could she be expected to finish Mussolini’s The Cardinal’s Mistress (‘the Lord knows I tried’) or Forty Thousand Sublime and Beautiful Thoughts (‘conscientious though I be, I am but flesh and blood’)? When Dwight Macdonald identified ‘amiability’ as the distinctive quality of New Yorker criticism, he wasn’t thinking of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... talk as if the president of Russia did not exist’. (Is this what Putin had in mind when – as Lord Browne, the former president of BP, recently revealed in his memoirs – he said: ‘I have eaten more dirt than I need to from that man’?) Best of all, perhaps, once the case got going the authorities were able to start landing Yukos with enormous tax ...”

“... and other traditions which help us to live with inequality; we like our judges and lawyers, our lord mayors and equerries, to appear in pantomime clothes on solemn occasions. Among the gilets jaunes there’s no shortage of ‘Frexit’ advocates on Saturday demonstrations, with their elaborate combination of hi-vis uniform and fancy dress. But Frexit packs ...”