Word: mitfords
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DIED. LADY DIANA MOSLEY, 93, most scandalous and, some thought, most beautiful of the six famous Mitford sisters; in Paris. She left her first husband, heir to the Guinness brewing fortune, to run away with Sir Oswald Mosley, the widely hated head of Britain's fascist party. After spending some of the war years in a London prison, she and her husband moved to Paris, where she continued to dazzle her frequent guests and write rigorous book reviews. Of Hitler, she said, in 2000, "I was fond of him. Very, very fond...
BOTTOM LINES "Because they can earn more money on the dole, Ma'am." Barry Mitford, deputy page to Queen Elizabeth, explaining to her why five footmen quit their jobs...
From the 1940s to the 1980s, the Mitford Industry (as the Mitfords themselves jokingly called it) produced several best-selling books, films, a television documentary and even a musical by and about that lively clan. At the center of it all were six beautiful, witty and controversial British sisters whose friendships ranged from the likes of Lytton Strachey to Maya Angelou, Joseph Goebbels to John Kennedy. They had, in the words of their most recent biographer, Mary S. Lovell, a "remarkable energy, joie de vivre and self-confidence" that made them seem almost like mythological creatures. Yet as Lovell notes...
...fact, prices can rise so fast that the independent funeral-home operators targeted by Mitford's first book suddenly find themselves to be death-care heroes. Rising prices have begun to erode the industry's historic immunity from bargain hunting. Consider Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where Loewen controls all but three funeral homes from Hyannis to Provincetown. (It offered to buy two of those three as well, but their owners declined.) The Massachusetts attorney general became concerned enough about Loewen's near monopoly to require the company to divest itself of three homes, a move of questionable value given that Loewen...
...With consolidation has come a level of depersonalization that family-owned funeral homes, for all their other alleged sins, have managed to resist. "It really shows that nothing is sacred," says Karen Leonard, executive director of California's Redwood Funeral Society (her E-mail name is CheapExit), who was Mitford's research associate. "You are just part of the machine. This is just another body. This is just another family. Sell, sell, sell...