The Hoogstratens were all regular attenders of Mass at St Joseph’s, the Roman Catholic church in Rustington. Nick, however, would soon throw off Catholicism. ‘Religion and politics are used to pervert and control ignorant people,’ he says. ‘If you’ve got a brain for yourself you know what’s right and wrong.’ (Location 104)
Note: interesting in light of both his behaviour and his later questioning. presuming that he still feels this, it seems likely that a moral superstructure exists that delineates right and wrong in ways nearly everyone else finds impossible to agree with. suggest this superstructure is money, which comprises fairly raw essences of law and morality, deprived of all other elements of social contract.
She was a floating luxury hotel with swimming pools, mahogany-panelled cocktail lounges, marble statues and cinemas. The saloons glittered with crystal chandeliers. Each cabin had its own en-suite bathroom – a real luxury in those days. She was advertised as being ‘a class apart’. (Location 165)
Music was only one of Nick’s ventures. He opened a boutique, Deb, in Brighton’s modish Regency Parade and he sank money into the rag trade. For the boutique’s champagne launch he hired Jimmy Saville, one of the best-known disc jockeys of the day. (Location 353)
Van Hoogstraten once implied that he’d had dealings with Rachman. It seems unlikely. Rachman died in 1962, a year before the younger man first got into the property business. (Location 382)
Social historian David Gladstone got to know some of them, Van Hoogstraten included. ‘They tended to be anti-establishment and anti-professional,’ he says. ‘They were iconoclasts and consciously against the status quo. They had become very successful not through the help of professionals but by their own efforts. Their view on life was that they’d got where they were unaided, and that was how the world should operate.’ (Location 437)
The climax was a screaming row between the two former friends in the boutique in Brighton that Jimmy Saville had opened only a few months earlier. (Location 471)
But when one of the police remarked to him that it would take a lot of money to kill every Jew in Brighton, Van Hoogstraten’s black humour got the better of him: ‘I could get the money and it is not such a bad idea after all.’ (Location 489)
Note: humour is interesting
He already had the swanky cars. He wore amazing clothes. He was buying antique French furniture. But he wanted more of the trappings of great wealth. He wanted to be a collector of rare objects, including jewels and silver, and he didn’t much care how he got them. (Location 577)
Van Hoogstraten took to Markworth at first sight and Markworth to him. There is no doubt that there was a special affinity between Van Hoogstraten and Markworth. (Location 751)
‘We rang the doorbell … to be greeted by a very strange-looking individual who opened the door. He was wearing – in the middle of the day – a cream dressing gown that was slightly open. He had on a pair of purple underpants and a pair of purple slippers. And his face seemed to be caked in what looked like foundation … a bit strange.’ (Location 807)
He emerged from it claiming to be psychic and calling himself ‘a child of the Sun’. He was destined, he told friends, to live in a white marble palace on a hill. (Location 955)
Van Hoogstraten, far away in Paris, was only too happy to take responsibility for what the press called the ‘Sussex siege’. The day after the evacuation he phoned the Evening Argus to put his side of it. As always, he was convinced that right was on his side. ‘We have £150,000 tied up in this property. The tenants are £8000 in arrears although they’re drawing £800 a week from the residents.’ ‘Don’t think these people have been unjustly treated,’ he added. He had been seeking possession for months. ‘I stalled off doing anything drastic or morally wrong, if you like, until the old folks had been removed. But we have had considerable trouble with East Sussex Social Services in moving them out.’ (Location 1040)
Note: mysterious morality. it’s not clear that he doesn’t think he’s doing right.
He is, when you see him, right there, in a deliberate, self-made sense. You feel he wants you to experience him. The problem is, how exactly? He says everyone, the media especially, gets him wrong. It’s no wonder. He is difficult to read. (Location 1098)
She and Van Hoogstraten have two children, both boys. The younger child, now about eleven, is called Louis, after Louis XIV, the Sun King, whose masterpiece was the Palace of Versailles. (Location 1210)
Note: this is true but not detailed enough to be useful. his political philosophy is that anyone who doesn’t own their own house is a serf or chattel. gradations of wealth below house ownership don’t count (wd be interesting to seek is he views other capital - property may be the basic requirement)
wealth itself is probably more like a spiritual metric.
it’s like the legal universe is that of urizen - material but spiritually imperfect and constraining.
the actual universe is best defined by brutal violence ‘whatever is necessary’ and is potentially illimitable tho assuming necessity may come up against necessity of another, it potentially results in final confrontations.
he is peculiarly honest - S’s point about the Jesuits?
law is a fallen version of his morality
‘It has been said that no man is an island. Well, I am. Money gives me the power to get and demand what I want. I want nobody. I need nobody… I ask nothing of anybody other than the right to go on with my life the way I want to lead it not as others would run it for me.’ (Location 1268)
His attitude to the laws of the land in this period was totally cavalier. They were a challenge – to be circumvented, defied and wherever possible mocked. (Location 1307)
At the time he was wearing a two-thousand-year-old Egyptian necklace made of gold and worth ‘in excess of £100,000’. (Location 1316)
As many as fifty of the seized properties had no tenants. They had been emptied before the Revenue struck. Van Hoogstraten wasn’t going to spend money on maintaining them. Most were boarded up and left to moulder. (Location 1337)
Van Hoogstraten knew what he wanted. He described being inspired by Buckingham Palace. ‘I went there when I was in my late teens to collect some items from King George V’s stamp collection. When you go in initially it’s through what looks like a medieval flagstone courtyard area which extends into the ground floor. Then, when you go up that grand staircase, you are in what I presume is (Location 1395)
Note: two this interesting: one, his knowledge of the language and history of property. 2, “all the things money can’t buy”
a nabob’s envy? elevation beyond pure finance. longs to live in the 18th Century (see capital) as a rentier (which is of course what he is). lands and a legitimised armorial/dynasty. note he is not an industrialist in any way.
purple. He wears a purple ring and a purple armband. He told me it was a royal colour and he regards himself as royalty, and that’s why he’s building himself a palace.’ (Location 1416)
As Van Hoogstraten has large investments in Africa, one can assume that this rare admission does indeed mean that his fortune has been recently declining. One former friend puts his wealth at a figure as low as £30 million, but the true amount must be higher. There was a time in his glory days when he made more than that in a year. (Location 1437)
Note: declining wealth certainly possible explanation of his change in manner.
‘I’m very frugal but I do like properly cooked plain English food. The French and Italians seem just to eat chopped-up rubbish covered in sauces. (Location 1607)
‘I was brought up a strict Roman Catholic and I believe that there is an ultimate supernatural force. But all organised religions are man-made and were invented by some man who was a bit cleverer and they are just used as a way of keeping the population under control. ‘I have my own religion which is power. I control the lives of hundreds and thousands of people just by making decisions about whether to buy or sell a particular business. ‘I believe that might is right. The clever and the strong will always survive. ‘I believe that all property is theft. If you go back in history all land and property is owned by someone because they nicked it from someone else. (Location 1611)
Oddly for a man judged to have broken the law so many times, Raja clearly brought up his family to respect it. He and Sarbie had three more children, all girls, and each one became a lawyer. (Location 2297)
Mean in so many things, Van Hoogstraten has always been generous with advice – where to live, who to trust (or more usually who not to trust), when to buy, when to sell. (Location 2347)
As he reached his fifties, Nicholas van Hoogstraten had begun to wonder about his own mortality. ‘For the first time in my life in the last few years I’ve been involved personally with people who have died, dealing with funerals and that sort of thing. And I don’t like the feeling,’ he told one of the authors in 1997. (Location 2494)
But in the next breath this vainest of men was mocking himself for being so mean about everything else: ‘We do things and we don’t exactly know why. Most of the things that I do, from when I get up to when I go to sleep, I don’t know why I am doing them. I wonder to myself sometimes why I am wasting my time using second-class stamps to save sixpence. Even if I do it a million times it adds up to a hill of beans.’ In this confessional mood Van Hoogstraten then admitted why the monument he was building, and the kids he had fathered, wouldn’t bear his family name. ‘The name is Hamilton Palace… Hamilton after Hamilton, capital of Bermuda. It was one of the few places in my youth that I fell in love with… My children are called Hamilton. It’s a fine colonial name … and I couldn’t foist my own terrible name on them, innocent children.’ (Location 2535)
Croke got twenty-three years, reduced to twenty on appeal. His many victims got a lifetime of trauma after being held captive, bound and gagged, threatened with guns and – ultimate horror – having what they thought were real bombs strapped to their bodies. (Location 2810)
had misdirected the jury and the conviction would be overturned. He wrote that his enemies would all have ‘egg on their faces when my wrongful conviction is quashed shortly, as it will have to be.’ In an afterthought, Van Hoogstraten – who hates to be thought well of – crossed out ‘egg’ before ‘on their faces’ and substituted in capital letters ‘SHIT’. (Location 3378)
