Word: highborn
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...will remember, of course, that Bernard Samson, England's rough-cut intelligence agent in Berlin, was bamboozling communist Stasi operatives with great success until his beautiful and highborn wife Fiona defected to East Germany and set up shop as a KGB colonel, no less. This breach of marital etiquette caused Samson endless problems -- how to find a suitable nanny for the children, whether to marry his young mistress, how to prove that he himself was not a Soviet mole, and so on -- detailed moodily and lengthily in the two most recent novels of Deighton's double trilogy, Spy Hook...
...Brown of the G.K. Chesterton stories, Cadfael attractively suggests that the highest act of faith is the use of reason. Robert Barnard, whose mordantly funny one-off mysteries are as good as any currently being produced, has tended to sag in the too cute series featuring Perry Trethowan, a highborn cop. In Cherry Blossom Corpse (Scribners; 213 pages; $14.95), Barnard is back at his malicious best. Perry accompanies his sister to a convention of romance novelists where, literarily speaking at * least, murder is the least of the crimes on display...
...central figures in this roundelay are a bewitchingly malign marquise (Lindsay Duncan), a good woman tempted to self-betrayal by love (Suzanne Burden), a virgin eager to surrender to ecstasy (Beatie Edney) and the highborn roue who is their sequential wooer (Alan Rickman). The essence of the roue's sexual appeal is a chilly, offhand disinterest. Neither kind nor attentive nor particularly virile, he does not so much inspire devotion as command it; he does not so much arouse ardor as compel his victims to confront their suppressed sexuality. He believes all virtue is fraud, and he delights in destroying...
...occasion does not have to be grand. Some of the most elegant dresses are of indigo cotton, appliqued with gold, made to be worn during India's harvest festival in the late fall, when the dark of the sky is deepest. There are social nuances in every garment, highborn or not. A man's white cotton overblouse can be tied in 58 ways, each with its own social connotation. The knots at the waist of a courtesan's skirt could be so intricate that only she could undo them: fashion as a fail-safe device. A contemporary turban, worn...
...Waugh "is likely to figure as the only first-rate comic genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw." Characters like Lady Margot Metroland, Mayfair hostess and procuress of Decline and Fall, Mrs. Melrose Ape of Vile Bodies, the American evangelist modeled on Aimee Semple McPherson, Basil Seal, highborn wastrel of Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags, and Lord Copper, publisher of the Beast in Scoop, still delight because there are always new grotesques to fill the shoes of Waugh's caricatures. And his work has more serious undertones: extrapolations of what Waugh called "existing social tendencies...