Englishman in New York

Around this time last year I took a ride to the Hamptons with one of the editors of the Forbes book to get some color for a chapter on conspicuous consumption. We zipped around the Long Island countryside on a beautiful fall day, snooping on various McMansions and gaudy homes. But nothing, and I mean nothing, beat Ira Rennert’s mansion-by-the-sea, Fair Field.

Next time you read a story about a billionaire plonking down $30 million or $40 million for a house, bear in mind that Rennert’s home was valued last year at $185 million. That’s $50 million more than Forbes’ official World’s Most Expensive Home Updown Court, in Windlesham, Surrey. (Rennert’s home doesn’t make the cut because the Forbes list only includes property on the market.)

Rennert’s five building, 63-acre beachfront compund includes a 66,000 sq ft Italienate mansion and sports 29 bedrooms, three swimming pools, a two-lane bowling alley, a 164-seat theater, and parking for between 20 and 200 cars, depending on which articles you read. The house even has its own power station. You can click on the image above for a closeup.

Fittingly, Ira Rennert is the man who had the bright idea of turning the military Humvee into a consumer car. His net worth this year? $3.5 billion.

You can hear my editors Annalyn Swan and Peter Bernstein talking about the book “All The Money in the World” on the Brian Lehrer Show on Monday at 11am.

Of all the homes I saw that day, I liked this one the most. When I make my first billion…

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With all the shenanigans going on in Russia at the moment in the run up to the forthcoming elections (will Putin become Prime Minister so that he can be President again?) its worth taking a look at David Remnick’s recent profile of opposition leader and former chess champion Gary Kasparov in The New Yorker.

It’s been more than five years since I was last in Russia, but the general malaise and distrust of Western-style democracy seems depressingly similar to that of the late 1990s, if not worse:

In today’s Russia, demokratia as it emerged in the nineties has been derisively called dermokratia: “shit-ocracy.” The notion of liberalism, too—a belief in the necessity of civil society, civil liberties, an open economy—has been degraded. Of all the pro-democracy activists and politicians of the late eighties and the nineties, the only one remembered fondly—if not very often—is the physicist and human-rights activist Andrei Sakharov. And that may be because he died in December, 1989, two years before the fall of the Soviet empire. The liberal parties that began in the nineties, such as Yabloko (Apple) and the Union of Right Forces, remain tainted by their connections to the Yeltsin era and no longer have seats in the Duma. “The state lets the opposition exist so long as there is no coalition,” Mikhail Kasyanov, the former Prime Minister, told me.

“You can scarcely find anyone in opposition, except for the Communists, just like in Yeltsin’s times,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recently told Der Spiegel. “If you take an unbiased look at the situation, there was a rapid decline of living standards in the nineteen-nineties, which affected three-quarters of Russian families, and all under the ‘democratic banner.’ Small wonder, then, that the population does not rally to this banner anymore.” Solzhenitsyn, who lives just outside Moscow, is eighty-eight, and in failing health. Although much of his work as a novelist and historian comprises a prolonged critique of Soviet power and the secret police, he speaks approvingly of Putin, who was a lieutenant colonel in the K.G.B. “Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people,” he said. “And he started to do what was possible—a slow and gradual restoration.”

But at what price?

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