Word: mayfairisms
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...course; the vast majority of British gardens today are no larger than one-tenth of an acre. Through the National Gardens Scheme, a plan started in 1927 to raise money for charity, 1,250 private gardens are now open to the public. The owner may be a duchess in Mayfair or a police sergeant in Clapham; the garden, big as a country club or small as a driveway...
...London's fashionable West End, he dazzled Mayfair dinner parties with imitations of leading politicians that wounded with the precision of a fine steel rapier. His public manner lent a youthful zest to politics that the British public openly admired. Thorpe's fall from grace, therefore, was all the more dramatic. In surprisingly sympathetic words, the prosecuting counsel, Peter Taylor, noted: "The tragedy of this case ... is that Mr. Thorpe has been surrounded and in the end his career blighted by the Scott affair. His story is a tragedy of truly Greek or Shakespearean proportions-the slow...
...appreciate how skillfully he balanced between satire and romance. Most important, these handsome new editions reconfirm Edmund Wilson's 1944 judgment that 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...
...willing to argue with that post-Waterloo appreciation-not in Britain, where gambling of every variety is not so much diversion as obsession. From the dowdy bingo parlors of Clapham Junction to the nobby casinos of Mayfair, the British now spin the wheels of chance to the rhythm of $15 billion a year. The main reason for the boom is clear to all: Britain is the most liberal gambling society in the world...
...marriage began to show visible strains. Rumors abounded of Snowdon's dalliance with fashion models. Increasingly, Margaret appeared imperiously scornful of him in front of friends, throwing down too many gins and tonic, while he tooled around with a trendy branch of the Mayfair smart...