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. I have already laid down a thousand bottles of Mumm.’

Ann Allestree is the pseudonym of the journalist Penelope Ann Craig, (House & Garden, English Heritage etc.), whose husband Tom, a director of Christie’s for nearly 20 years, features prominently in the book, taking them to stately homes where he assesses valuables. Allestree is no Lees-Milne, her style closer to Daisy Ashford and The Young Visiters. In the first entry, family lunch chez Lord and Lady Gainsborough is served by Bottomley the butler: ‘fish fingers, followed by two family-size blocks of vanilla ice cream, an accompanying hot chocolate sauce exuded from Bottomley’s silver sauceboats.’ She has a cavalier way with language and grammar, and the non sequiturs can be beguiling: Lady Gainsborough ‘is excessively compos mentis having had seven children’.