Allan Massie

Getting the detail right

Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’

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Arabella Byrne

Revenge of the rural Barbour

From Spectator Life
Time was, a Barbour meant one thing: the classic Beaufort model that stank of wax, wet dog, and had pockets stuffed with cartridges from a shoot. Naturally, the late Queen Elizabeth modelled it best, standing at Balmoral in hers with her trademark neckerchief. There is an apocryphal tale that, like all die-hard Barbour devotees, the

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