Men used to tell me how they used butter for sex, now they tell me how they’ve eliminated it from their diet. - Edward St Aubyn

No doubt his grandmother and his great-grandfather had hoped to empower a senator, enrich a great art collection or encourage a dazzling marriage, but in the end they had mainly subsidized idleness, drunkenness, treachery and divorce.

Death was kind of a boisterous egomaniac that needed no encouragement.

Only in a country free from the funnelling of primogeniture and the levelling of égalité could the fifth generation of a family still be receiving parcels of wealth from a fortune that had essentially been made in the 1830s.