Duty, devotion and lack of self-pity — Anne Glenconner is an example to us all

Trained from a young age to be self-effacing, never liking to be the centre of attention, having been traumatised for life by being made to wear a bright green dress sewn from old parachute material at her own coming out dance in 1950, Anne Glenconner must be wincing at being thrust into the limelight by today’s columnists. Suddenly she is being fêted as Lady Stiff Upper Lip, poster girl for the British non-self-pitying spirit and an example to us all — particularly to Prince Andrew and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

She protests she wasn’t stiff-upper-lipped at one of the worst moments of her life, which was on a Concorde flight to Miami in 1986 to see her son Christopher, who lay in a coma in hospital after a motorcycle accident in his gap year. ‘Much to Colin’s irritation,’ she writes, ‘I couldn’t stop crying.’

The sensitive reader of this fascinating and beautifully written memoir shudders not only at the emotional agony of that flight but also at those four words, ‘much to Colin’s irritation’.