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It’s fortunate that Stavros Niarchos didn’t live to see the headline printed in The Washington Post on April 17, 1996. “Greek tycoon, Onassis rival Stavros Niarchos dies at 86,” it read, proof positive of the whimsical cruelty of history. Despite huge success and extravagant wealth, an alpha personality twinned with charisma, and a taste for risk that was just one failure away from recklessness, this hero of the Age of Oil lives on only as the ultimate loser in a giant game of oneupmanship.

But for that marriage to a presidential widow (give or take an opera star), it would be Niarchos we picture when we hear the still-redolent phrase ‘Greek shipping magnate’. Pretty much anything Aristotle Onassis did, Niarchos could do better — and did first. end — in itself. As an obituary he might have preferred put it, in , he had an “exceptional ability to make and waste vast sums of money”.