Quotes from Anne de Courcy

The young Winston Churchill used to stand in the doorway of a ballroom, rating female looks on the Helen of Troy basis: 'Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?' he would ask a friend standing with him, receiving in answer a murmured: 'Two hundred ships?' as a young woman passed. 'By no means,' Winston would respond. 'A covered sampan or a small gunboat at most.

The budget deficit for 1932, expected to be around twenty million pounds, would in fact be nearer one hundred seventy million pounds.

The audience consisted of young toughs from the shops and the banks and that type of ageing ex-serviceman who has pathetically retained his military rank from the war. It was the people of England who, in Chesterton's poem, have not yet spoken. God help England if they ever do, for they are a mass of prejudice, ignorance, intolerance and cruelty.

By the late 1890s spending had become more than just a mark of status, a weapon for rising in society, a wish to be surrounded only by the best, a form of self-aggrandisement or even a way of giving pleasure to others, but simply an end in itself and even a validation of identity – I spend, therefore I am.

Her defeat did not stop Mrs Fish exercising her sharp and often cruel wit even against those she counted as friends. She even stood up to the formidable Alva, a close confidante, when Alva accused her of telling all their friends that she, Alva, looked like a frog. 'No, no!' cried Mamie, 'not a frog! A toad, my pet, a toad.

I don't want to die with grey hair', she told a friend. 'It's so depressing.')

Between 1875 and 1905 over forty American girls married into the peerage, bringing with them the dollars that saved many a stately home from ruin. There were many attempts to calculate the total amount of American dollars spent in dowry payments; one estimate said that American brides had brought in $50 million to Britain, but the probability is that it was nearer a billion dollars – money that went straight into the pockets of the men they married.

A dinner made up wholly of young people is generally stupid.

If you are going to refuse, do so at once, but remember that a dinner once accepted is a sacred obligation. If you die before the dinner takes place, your executor must attend the dinner

My dear sir, I do not argue, I inform.

a real live count ought to be a passport for them [the Gould family] into the innermost of the inner circles, which privilege they so much crave,' said the New York World, showing a lively appreciation of the truth that the simplest way for a family to elevate itself into the top level of New York society was through the strategic marriage of a daughter.

His appetite was enormous: he would eat a breakfast of haddock, poached eggs, bacon, chicken and woodcock before a day's shooting, lunch and dinner of ten to fourteen courses, elaborate teas, snacks of lobster salad or cold chicken, with a cold chicken left by his bed at night in case he became hungry.

From henceforth he is dead to me. I want to know nothing. He has deserted me at my hardest time in my hour of need & I want to forget him tho' I wish him every joy & luck & happiness in this life…

His family, like hers, was horrified, her brother-in-law John 'Jack' Leslie writing to his wife, Jennie's younger sister Leonie: 'I hope G. West has survived the honeymoon.' (Jennie had once been described as 'more panther than woman'.)

One such family, the Stewarts, went as far as building a mansion opposite that of Mrs Astor so that she could not avoid seeing them. What perhaps they did not realise was that she so guarded the exclusiveness on which her myth was founded that she would not even go near her own windows lest the crowds that thronged Fifth Avenue hoping to catch a glimpse of the rich and famous should see her.

It took some time for acceptance to be reached, and at first she was bitterly lonely ('It is not all a bed of roses to live in a strange country and I am as strange to the people and their ways as they are to me')