Lewis Jones reviews Mr Five Per Cent by Jonathan Conlin (Profile). Bees and Their Keepers by Lotte Moller, review: a buzzy account of nature’s most orderly insect, Hitler and Stalin by Laurence Rees review: a tale of two tyrants, How a family tragedy inspired the best poem of 2020, I Wanna be Yours by John Cooper Clarke review: poetry, drugs and rock'n'roll, The Murder of Professor Schlick by David Edmonds review: reinventing philosophy in 'degenerate' Vienna, Purple Ronnie illustrator Giles Andreae: ‘My stick man doodle made me a seven-figure sum per year’. Others at the time had moral objections to the Soviet commissars, one oilman stating firmly that ‘such money is used to promote revolution and murder. Much of the art was amassed in disgraceful circumstances, including Rembrandts from the Hermitage after the Russian revolution.
At one point, absurdly, he sued his father in open court, claiming 5 percent of the 5 percent.
He had written a report on the exploitation of Mesopotamian oil in 1894; the first crude from Kirkuk reached the Mediterranean in 1934.
He acquired a palace in Paris, but kept it more or less as a museum. In 1936 he began to consider donating his art collection to the National Gallery in London. ‘I am the master — it is I who have the money — I will flatten everything in my path,’ Gulbenkian once told his wife.
But he did spend huge sums on jewellery by René Lalique, although apparently Nevarte, his poor socialite wife, was never permitted to wear any of it. At the time of his death, Gulbenkian's fortune was estimated at between US$280 million and US$840 million.
During the war he found refuge in neutral Lisbon, where he took five suites at the Hotel Aviz, and where the chief curator of the National Gallery in Washington spent years wooing him for his collection, offering to send a US warship to carry his paintings across the Atlantic. Centre: ‘The Break-up of the Ice’ by Claude Monet. It is a blameless thing.
You might disagree with half of it, but you’ll enjoy reading all of it. There were 44 doctors in his address book, and by way of a rejuvenating tonic one of them insisted he have regular sex with young women, which he did in his hotel suite. This article was originally published in The Spectator magazine.
The flow could not be brought under control for more than a week; five workers were asphyxiated by the gas cloud that formed.
Like many obscenely rich men, Calouste was from an already very wealthy family. This biography reminds me of Anthony Powell’s devastating portrait of Sir Magnus Donners, another rich patron whose.
His wife, Nevarte, led a sad life. When it came to it, Gulbenkian was extremely reluctant to invest any of his 5 per cent in the necessary infrastructure — in, for instance, contributing towards the costs of constructing pipelines.