Word: mayfairs
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...home as a Mad Hatter's champagne party. They called Rosa the Duchess of Jermyn Street, and rated her and the Cavendish itself as two of the three most rewarding landmarks in London (with the Tower, which has not taken many boarders since the 16 century). The mid-Mayfair hotel remained for decades one of the last places in all England where, as Evelyn Waugh wrote of it in Vile Bodies, "one can still draw up, cool and uncontaminated, great, healing draughts of Edwardian certainty...
...London, and he is on the line. Contentedly he clicks down the phone. Shy men like Sellers hate to talk to friends, let alone strangers. Sellers is the world's best mimic, equipped with an enormous range of accents, inflections and dialects-including five kinds of cockney, Mayfair pukka, stiff upper BBC, Oxford, Cambridge, Yorkshire, Lancashire, West Country, Highland Scots, Edinburgh Scots, Glaswegian Scots, Tyneside Geordie, Northern Ireland, Southern Ireland, French, Mitteleuropa, American Twang, American Drawl, American Snob, Canadian, Australian and three kinds of Indian. He fools everybody. Everybody but his friends, that is; they are wise...
...short stories of this collection are told in the first person and appear in chronological order. As such, they are links in Alec Waugh's own footloose life, beginning with his callow saunterings through Soho restaurants and Mayfair drawing rooms and ending with surprise encounters in tropic seas. As Alec Waugh sojourns from Malayan rice fields to Levantine hospitals, from German opera houses to sleepy islands in the Indian Ocean, his plots rise happily out of the travelogue prose. In The Last Chukka, the British manager of a Siamese lumber camp imagines that he has leprosy and goes jungle...
...interesting silence . . . Sympathizers with your plight will readily escort you on tours of gasworks, municipal offices and other near showplaces such as the British Transport Commission or any of the more liberal-minded Catchment [Drainage] Boards." A cheap half-day tour: "two building sites, waits in selected Mayfair bus-queues, a good look at Aldgate Pump...
...time, but he was convinced that Europe was entering on a phase of barbarism, at the very moment the African races believed that they were emerging from it. The perception of that parallel lay at the heart of Waugh's satiric genius. His Bright Young People-the Mayfair savages of his English novels-were tribal kin to his jungle primitives...