The art expert chat is always a triumph. What more can I say? It's my Book of the Year already.¹ BARBARA TRAPIDO

High Time - high style, high jinx. My kind of novel - intelligent escapism at its most satisfying' - Gyles Brandreth Hannah Rothschild CBE is a British writer, documentary filmmaker, businesswoman and philanthropist. Her biography, The Baroness, was published in 2012 in the UK, US and twelve other territories. Her first novel, The Improbability of Love, published in 2015 won the Bollinger Wodehouse Prize for best comic novel and was runner up for the Bailey Women's Prize for fiction in 2015. Her much anticipated latest novel, House of Trelawney, was published in February 2020. Of course Ferguson demolishes many of the myths that have surrounded the Rothschilds since their ascent, much of which emerged from scurrilous anti-Semitic tracts (for instance, Nathan Rothschild didn't make his fortune buying bonds when he heard first the information about Waterloo, in fact, he had large contracts out to supply the army that peace, at least at this point, threatened to cancel). Still, Ferguson wonderfully explains how the family's Jewish identify helped them succeed and at the same time kept them out of the top realms of power. Still, their desire for a removal from the Christian world often lead to a stunning amount of inbreeding in the third and later generations of the family that one cannot help but be baffled at.In the second generation most of the family’s wealth was spent “carefully”. Property investments were selected partly for comfort but also for business (either client relations, banking, or as money-earning investments). In the third and later generations (and James, as he lived into these later years), they began to buy and create grander and grander estates. At this time they also acquired many of the works of art that were lost in the confiscations of WWII. Nathan’s son, Nathaniel, who went and stayed in France, bought the vineyard today known as Mouton Rothschild in 1853. (Before the 1855 Classification of Bordeaux). Fifteen years later, Uncle James bought the much larger Chateau Lafite (Lafite Rothschild). THE IMPROBABILITY OF LOVE is a romp, a joy, and an inspired feast of clever delights. Reading this book is like a raid on a high-end pastry shop ‹ you marvel at the expertise and cunning of the creations, while never wanting the deliciousness to end." ­ ELIZABETH GILBERT We love Hamilton, but perhaps we're not far enough away from the financial crisis to truly love Nathaniel Rothschild like we love Hamilton, but unlike the white Hamilton, Nathaniel is a continuous outcast Jew. What if someone wrote a book claiming that the development of modern capitalism was the product of a secretive and inbred family of Jews, for half a century the wealthiest men alive, the bankers to every major European monarch, who gained their fortune as war profiteers in the age of Napoloeon and went on to control the international bond market and the currency exchanges of Europe, who pulled the strings of diplomacy and empire throughout the Hundred Years’ Peace when Europe ruled the world, a family whose hundred tentacles still extend, secretive as ever, through the banks and financiers of the world, and who are behind some of the largest and most sinister corporations of the last century, such as Rio Tinto Mining Corporation and De Beers Diamonds? Ha! What kind of neo-Nazi nut case would whip up a conspiracy theory that grandiose and unlikely?! This is fascinating but very dense. Not for every reader. If you love financial history though, it is great.

At first glance Thelonious (Monk) and Pannonica (Rothschild) might seem to have nothing in common. Yet as Hannah Rothschild shows in this tender memoir, the symmetries of their lives ran far deeper.' Kathryn Hughes, The Mail on Sunday

Success!

There he began a business career that made him a respectable, if not prosperous man. As the years went on, he trained his five sons in business and began to establish them in the cities that would house the five branches of the family bank: Frankfurt (Amschel), London (Nathan), Naples (Carl), Vienna (Solomon), and Paris (James). Hannah tells this story with care, balancing narrative tension with a desire to lay out all the facts so readers can make up their own minds… wholly gripping.' Rachel Cooke in The Guardian This volume goes into even more detail than the first. It basically continues like that until the beginning of World War I, and sort of during the inter-war period, but then skims through the final decades. This was a bit disappointing to me, since I was curious to know more about recent years (at least until the 90s, since the book was written in 2000), and I got the impression he did this so as not to offend any members of the family who are currently alive, which doesn't make me feel good about the rest of the book.

it was always a weakness of the conservative argument against higher taxation that in general private charitability at the turn of the century tended to fall short of the traditional 10 per cent" (p. 276) Fans of House of Trelawney (and there are quite a few, including us) will devour this sequel. . . . There are enough plot twists to outdo a New York pretzel. And High Time is more delicious.” As the history of Europe unfolded around them, the family was able to conduct business between countries and even warring states (their primary business during this period was lending to governments or rulers). Changes in the balance of power and rulership began to liberalize the laws in many countries, although the German states remained behind other. England was, by far, the most liberal at this time. Nathaniel Rothschild is Kanye West. To the European nobles he did business with: He knows you don't like him, he sees you cringing at his Jewishness, but he also knows he runs the show, and he's going to make damn sure you know it. You get giddy reading the contempt he has for the average European aristocrat. It's delightfully similar to the joy we all take, and I'm sure Kanye takes, in making a fool out of Taylor Swift.

But this story (which could also be told as a perfect rags-to-riches fairy tale) is actually true, and it is told in compelling and exhaustive detail by Niall Ferguson in this volume and its sequel.