Word: butlering
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Firkin [Britain's largest brewer]. We had loads of funding for staff and promotions and Firkin kept the place looking nice. In those days, we were packed." The Flag, as has been known since the Firkin Brewery went out of business in 2001, is owned by Mitchell and Butler, the leading operator of pubs and pub restaurants in the U.K. Before Christmas, Mitchell and Butler announced the pub would close in the New Year. Two weeks ago, they were given a reprise until the fall - but the place is falling apart...
...Monfreid meets, among others, an imprisoned spy (a "venomous reptile") whose escape he enables and later regrets; a Chinese trepang trader on a deserted island; a metrosexual polyglot butler; a Bedouin shouldering a Remington; a priest who manufactures hashish; and a hashish distributor who operates from an undertaker's office. He sketches all the misfits he encounters with anthropological and sartorial precision, colorfully and poetically noting the red tarboosh of a Tigrean guard; the "sublime crease" of a servant's "beautiful putty trousers"; and a Greek engineer's soiled celluloid collar, "yellow and clouded as a clay pipe...
...under questioning called the proceeding a character assassination. And, in a sense, he was right - that was the whole point. On the last day of his testimony at the inquest into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed, former butler Paul Burrell was forced to defend his credibility against an army of lawyers intent on, if not destroying it, then at least giving it a good beating. But early on it became clear that this was not going to be the courtroom drama everyone had hoped for. Instead, there was back-pedaling, name-calling and quibbling over semantics...
...statement that takes a bite out of Mohamed Al-Fayed's claim that they were assassinated to stop them getting married. But Mansfield opened to a page in Burrell's 2003 book A Royal Duty, and read out a passage that indicated some people did mind - including the former butler himself. In the book, Burrell describes a conversation he once had with Diana's good friend Rosa Monckton about Dodi. "We must do something about this one," Burrell told Monckton. "He is not right...
...inquest and the intensity of Mansfield's questioning had confused him. (With his quick-fire interrogation and his reedy, disdainful tone, Mansfield is a cross between TV detective Columbo and Harry Potter's Professor Severus Snape.) "I didn't know what I would be asked," the former butler said. "I thought it would be easier than it is. Quite frankly, it's been horrid...