Britain | Bagehot

The British establishment is the world’s most open—for a price

Rich foreigners get a warm welcome, whatever the source of their money

SOMETIMES FICTIONAL characters are so vivid that they cannot be confined to the page. Augustus Melmotte began life as a villain in Anthony Trollope’s 1875 masterpiece “The Way We Live Now”. Seventy years later he escaped into the real world in the form of Captain Robert Maxwell, a Czech war hero whose extraordinary rise and fall is the subject of a new book (see article).

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “The price of acceptance”

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