Wealth & Money Quote by R. W. Apple, Jr.

A phrase like this works because it sounds like praise while quietly behaving like a raised eyebrow. "Extraordinary wealth" is factual, almost clinical; "a taste for the sumptuous" is where the judgment slips in, soft as velvet and just as suffocating. Apple isn’t describing comfort or even luxury. "Sumptuous" suggests indulgence elevated into aesthetic principle: the kind of spending that wants to be seen as culture, not merely consumption.

The intent is classic high-reportage shorthand: compress an entire social world into a line that can travel. It’s the linguistic equivalent of walking a reader through a gilded room without listing every chandelier. "Allied to" is the tell. Wealth isn’t just present; it’s in partnership with taste, implying deliberateness, curation, even ideology. This isn’t money that accidentally accumulates nice things; it’s money that recruits style to justify itself.

The subtext is about power laundering. The sumptuous becomes a kind of alibi, a way to convert raw inequality into refinement. Apple’s journalistic voice often carried that cool, metropolitan ability to describe privilege as both impressive and faintly absurd. The line nods to the old idea that taste is a moral achievement, then undercuts it by reminding you taste, here, is funded.

Contextually, it reads like a capsule description of elite spaces Apple covered: international capitals, diplomatic theater, old-world estates, the places where wealth performs stability. He’s not scolding outright; he’s letting the phrasing do the work, inviting the reader to hear the clink of silver and also the hollowness underneath.