FOR more than a century, the Palm Court at the Ritz hotel in London has resonated with the clink of fine china, as gentlefolk sip afternoon tea and nibble crustless cucumber sandwiches beneath glistening chandeliers.
"If he has written Saving Grace – good title –about me being a ball-breaking editrice of a Covent Garden-based small-circulation weekly aimed at gentlefolk, I take my hat off to him and, obviously, can't wait to read it".
The gentlefolk around him, either oblivious to or startled by this uncouth character, are real people, presumably the relatives of whoever commissioned the picture from Everdingen.
Boccaccio still liked gentlefolk, especially highborn ladies, with cheeks like roses, but it is in their commentaries on the tales — and, for the most part, only then — that the Decameron becomes boring.
They evoke an easy, sensual, exotic Mediterranean life, full of implied contrast to the repressions of Belgravia; in the days of her early books, at least, David's passionate endorsement of the use of garlic and olive oil in cooking must have struck her audience of gentlefolk with the force of a sexual taboo being broken.
"Date Night" is depressing: the movie seems aimed at gentlefolk too scared of Manhattan to leave their tour buses, but any such actual families from New Jersey or elsewhere, "boring" or not, deserve to be entertained with something better than stale panic from old movies.
During the Prohibition era, the gentlefolk of Lynchburg used to frighten their daughters with tales of crime, vice, and white slavery in Fairview Heights.
Here too the houses don't follow one another; the suburb loses itself bizarrely in the countryside, the "county" that fills up the eternal west of forests and prodigious plantations where savage gentlefolk hunt down their gossip columns by artificial light.
Fans of British film will recognize the plot from the classic British comedy "Kind Hearts and Coronets," which gave Alec Guinness a chance to display his own virtuosity as a raft of British gentlefolk falling prey to an ambitious relative.
The same book inspired a classic Ealing Studios comedy, "Kind Heart and Coronets," which featured Alec Guinness memorably portraying a similar array of doomed British gentlefolk.
But as posited in "In Search of Rex Whistler," a new book by Mirabel and Hugh Cecil Frances Lincoln Publisherss), and "The Unseen Rex Whistler," an exhibition at Colefax and Fowler's showroom in Mayfair from Nov. 22 to Dec. 14, there was more to the British artist than gentlefolk riding exquisitely to hounds.
