Word: diana
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This is really a two-part book, a fairy tale with corpses. Lady Diana Duff Cooper is able to evoke a world as fragile and opulent as an Edwardian conservatory filled with orchids, and still face the time when the glass broke in 1914 and the killing four-year frost came in. Her personal story is romantic enough to make Ouida-lady laureate of the plush paradise-blush for modesty. It is offset by the tough self-knowledge of an aristocracy that called a pretty fast tune but was prepared to pay a stiff price for the piper. One-fourth...
Rich Pixies. Before her rich and talented friends went, like Poet Rupert Brooke himself, "rose-crowned into the darkness," life was a fabulous affair for little Lady Diana Manners. She spent part of her childhood in the "celestial light" of Bedfordshire, where "the clouds cast no shadows," and at her grandfather's Belvoir Castle. The plumbing there was not much, but there were "watermen" to bring hot and cold water along miles of corridors, watchmen to pace the battlements by night, and a "gong man," who served as a perambulating clock. There was even an ancient serving-maid...
...Lady Diana's childhood was clouded by nothing worse than an unfortunate German governess, muscular trouble (treated with galvanism), and a feeling that she was not so pretty as her sisters. Actually, she grew up to be the most celebrated beauty of London society, later impressed the U.S. public by her appearances as the Virgin and as the Nun in Max Reinhardt's 1924 production of The Miracle. She was spared the rigors of a formal education, and to this day claims that her spelling is so phonetic that when she has a cold she writes...
...Manners family was an island of liberal, slightly wacky culture. Mother patronized that daring new thing, the Russian Ballet, and was a talented artist. Once Queen Victoria posed for her briefly. (The duchess had to finish the sketch by rigging out a servant in a pudding-basin and mantilla.) Diana's sister-in-law took some pigs up in an airplane to prove that they could fly. Once in Venice the rich young pixies were visited by an old family friend, dressed him up as a doge and danced around him to celebrate his birthday. He was Herbert Asquith...
...roll of long-dead parties, and seeing the photographs of her long-dead suitors (each marked by a common quality of good looks, bravery and a certain vulnerability), it is impossible not to believe that the "haloed band" did not sense what it was in for. Their parties, Lady Diana says, were "dances of death." On one party, on a chartered boat on the Thames, young Denis Anson thought it would be a good idea to take a dip. He was never seen again. Diana held his watch, and later consoled herself that he probably would have been the first...