It is the modern day version of Charles Dickens’s interminable Victorian probate case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, that was the gloomy backdrop to his classic novel Bleak House. But this 21st century legal war of attrition involves members of the same immensely wealthy London family — including the owner of Britain’s biggest private contemporary art collection and the Mayfair building that houses Scott’s restaurant — who are locked in the litigation equivalent of hand-to-hand combat in courtrooms on three continents.
Yet remarkably, despite already dragging on for 11 years with no sign of an end, hardly anything has been written about the bitter conflict splitting the publicity-shy Salem dynasty.
