SOURCE: “Dynasty,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 21, 1999, p. 4.

In the following review, Morton praises the unprecedented inside perspective offered in the second volume of The House of Rothschild but complains of it's excessive detail and documentation.

In the annals of both high finance at its most feral and of high society at its most opulent, no entry has quite the glow of “Rothschild.” “That family,” the editor of the French edition of Vogue once sighed, “is the true successor to the Bourbons.” In England, the Rothschilds probably matched the fortune, and certainly transcended the flair, of the Windsors. In Austria, they sported a magnificence competitive with the Hapsburgs’. They imprinted their escutcheon on the fastest thoroughbreds, the rarest orchids, the choicest wines, the biggest and toughest bond floatings.

Yet this array of superlatives still does not account for the special luster of their name. “Rothschild” is...