What Michael Bloomberg Could Learn From “Middlemarch”

If Michael Bloomberg were a figure from a nineteenth-century novel, it would be one written by Anthony Trollope, whose depictions of the uneasy intersection of class, money, and politics—especially in his satirical masterpiece, “The Way We Live Now”—read like an uncanny commentary upon early-twenty-first-century society, despite having been written a hundred and forty years ago. But Trollope, a provincial postmaster as well as an eminent novelist, didn’t occupy an eighteenth-century mansion on an exclusive stretch of the embankment of the Thames; George Eliot, his literary peer and friend, did. And so it is the former home of the author of “Middlemarch”—called by many the greatest novel in the English language—that Bloomberg recently purchased, for about twenty-five million dollars.