A thousand bottles of Mumm

The front cover shows a mature English beauty in an Oriental doorway, elegant in a turban, with twinset and pearls. On the back is a Country Life portrait of a radiant English rose. Both are Ann Allestree, who for 30 years supped at the high table of grand society, travelled, and set down her impressions. Seize the Day is an insider’s view of the wilder reaches of privilege.

She met ambassadors, Eastern potentates, and enduring stars — Freya Stark, Harold Acton, Rebecca West. English eccentrics wander through her pages — barmy lords, batty old ladies, posh grotesques to set a Marxist drooling. Lord Binning invites her to dinner, and waves her into the kitchen ‘over a large pool of blood’, having just eviscerated a deer whose liver he intends to serve. Sir Francis Dashwood plans a birthday dance for his wife with ‘a string of dusky women naked to the waist … They will wear turbans and serve champagne.