Bagehot | The price of acceptance

摘要

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 Books & arts section).