This is a book I have wanted to write for fifty years. It is about the romance of making money and the thrill of commercial history. As a research student in Florence in the early 1970s, I looked at documents about works of art exported from Tuscany to the court of Charles I. Allocated a desk in the crepuscular Archivio di Stato, at a time when that institution found itself between the Arno and the Birth of Venus, not even Botticelli could have lifted the sense of doom. Months passed, as did mood – from gloom to joy