John Naughton once
spoke to Robert Maxwell at a meeting. It was quite a meeting.
After a while, the great man reappeared and invited us to join him for “luncheon”. This old-fashioned locution, by the way, seemed to be typical of his speech, at least when he was trying to be polite. On my way in I had passed him in a corridor, deep in conversation with two besuited lackeys. I caught a phrase as we went by: “We should issue proceedings forthwith,” he said. His English sounded oddly quaint, as if he had learned it out of that mythical phrasebook in which the postillion has been struck by lightning.
(Robert Maxwell was a powerful businessman whose fraud was discovered after his death. He's the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, the woman who delivered young girls to the pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.)