“Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where.”
“Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where.”
Richard Davenport-Hines
“He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning.”
Richard Davenport-Hines“Western civilisation, the élitists all understood, is built upon discrimination: a culture that does not rest on discrimination, that penalises people who discriminate, or rewards the undiscriminating, is worth very little and has only callow, childish pleasures.”
Richard Davenport-Hines, Proust at the Majestic“Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy.”
Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes“The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist.”
Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes“At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies.”
Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes“Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.”
Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes“Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where.”
Richard Davenport-Hines, Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came FromAll in One Creative & Marketing Platform to tell stories at scale
