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“... We missed you at Chantilly,’ Ann Fleming wrote to Evelyn Waugh in 1956, after she’d been to visit Diana Cooper in France. ‘Mr Gaitskell came to lunch and fell in love with Diana ... He had never seen cocktails with mint in them or a magnum of pink champagne. He was very happy. I lied and told him that all the upper class were beautiful and intelligent and he must not allow his vermin to destroy them ...”

“... which allowed for his probably quite numerous affairs, particularly his long relationship with Ian Fleming’s wife, Ann – certainly the Gaitskells often dined with one or both Flemings, making one wonder quite what the mutual understandings were. Ann Fleming was a wealthy Tory ...”

“... You must explain to me why Cyril wants Barbara,’ Evelyn Waugh wrote to Ann Fleming in September 1955, a year after Barbara Skelton’s marriage to Cyril Connolly had formally ended. ‘It’s not as though she were rich or a good housekeeper or the mother of his children.’ The following year Edmund Wilson asked Connolly, now two years into his divorce, why he didn’t get someone else ...”

“... tells himself about halfway through From Russia with Love, the fifth and perhaps the best of Ian Fleming’s thrillers. This sounds like good advice, but it does raise one large issue: what exactly counts as being ‘pickled’? Flying from London to Istanbul – the journey in the course of which Bond indulges in these reflections – Bond drinks ‘two ...”

“... Ann Fleming once remarked that she was so depressed that ‘last night I would have put my head in the gas oven, if I wasn’t too frightened of the cook to go into the kitchen.’ The uneasy balance of power between domestic servants and their masters and mistresses, especially mistresses, is the theme of Alison Light’s study of the home life of Virginia Woolf, whose complicated relationship with her own cook, Nellie Boxall, involved a degree of intimidation on both sides ...”

“... study in Piers Court, where he corresponds with wealthy, witty ladies (Mitford takes turns with Ann Fleming and Diana Cooper) who keep him au fait with the doings of vile bodies in the world from which he has withdrawn. The postal service is so good that a letter from Mitford in postwar Paris telling of the latest liaison dangereuse can be on his desk ...”

“... who travelled to the offices of Private Eye to spill the beans. Also expelled was Caspar, son of Ann Fleming, whose influence in high society was legendary. In White’s and Brooks’s and at the Carlton the conversation turned invariably to ‘the flogger they’ve got in charge of Eton’. There was only one thing for it: the bounder had to go. Trench ...”

“... will reveal himself to be Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the sinister mastermind familiar from three of Ian Fleming’s later novels and from his showdowns with the Bonds played by Sean Connery, George Lazenby and Roger Moore. (Copyright issues prevented any showdowns with Bond as played by Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan.) Craig’s Bond is tougher than any of his ...”

“... authority of this tremendous personage. ‘Last night I would have put my head in the gas oven,’ Ann Fleming wrote, ‘if I wasn’t too frightened of the cook to go into the kitchen.’Landemare​ was the crème de la crème. She could afford to work as an ‘occasion’ cook for grand dinners and parties. Her clientele were often politicians. The ...”

“... missionary in full seriousness. He was tolerant of the agnosticism of his female friends, such as Ann Fleming, Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford. But he became obsessed by trying to convert John Betjeman to his own faith, and bombarded the poet with furious injunctions to submit. ‘If you try to base your life and hopes on logical absurdities YOU WILL GO ...”

“... Holkham. His intimate friends were déclassé aristocrats: Lady Diana Duff Cooper, Nancy Mitford, Ann Fleming, spirited women who had broken out of the suffocating embrace of eligible matches and estates. His clothes were sometimes a comical caricature of what a country gentleman and former officer of the Blues would wear.The Augustinian conception of ...”

“... exhibition of the work of a British artist. It is also one of the dullest. Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams have resisted the tendency of the last fifteen years or so by which the catalogues of major exhibitions have often been presented as major interpretative studies of the artist and his times. Constable is a catalogue, nothing more. It maximises ...”

“... a stammer’ in Maugham’s presence. On another occasion, Maugham ‘gave him an icy stare’ as Ann Fleming – wife of Ian – chastised him ‘by banging a serving spoon on his offensively prominent ear trumpet’. Christopher Isherwood, on the other hand, found that Maugham’s stammer ‘somehow made you feel that you were stammering, not ...”

“... its components being carefully itemised. Product names litter the text as thickly as in any Ian Fleming. The author is Japanese, fluent, it seems, in both English and French; like John Murray, she is alive to those periods of adjustment and stress when cultures meet. There are some nicely-judged moments of wry humour when Asako meets those who wish to ...”

“... and utterly beguiling people. He is wise and effervescent and an inspired conversationalist.’ Ann Fleming reported on a dinner with Bacon in August 1959, when it turned out that he was supposed to be on a date with ‘a Ted at Piccadilly Circus’. She suggested that Bacon bring this Ted along, but was ‘warned by Cecil that he was known to be ...”