In those early days Mr. Feinstein was a polite piano-bar crooner with too many rings on his fingers, who exuded the hothouse aura of a former child prodigy serenading blue-haired ladies and their lapdogs with Gershwin and Berlin standards.
"What unites us is an unconditional love for France," Marion Maréchal-Le Pen told an eclectic audience ranging from retired business leaders in smart loafers to heavy-metal fans, poor farmers, trendy teenage girls and people carrying lapdogs with bows in their hair.
I pass an interiors shop whose USP seems to be that every single item, from picture frames to table lamps, is encrusted in diamante, and a boutique specialising in "pet couture" including a pink leotard for your lapdog emblazoned with the motto "This Is What Spoiled Looks Like".
It seems as though, no matter who the American president is, Britain will be there to play lapdog, to help with the drone strikes, free trade deals, and rendition sites.
In Yalta, Chekhov wrote one of his most famous stories, "The Lady with the Dog" (also called "Lady with Lapdog"), which depicts what at first seems a casual liaison between a married man and a married woman in Yalta.
Do we condemn Gurov in Chekhov's "Lady With a Lapdog" because he's a rake: philandering, insincere, guilty of seducing an innocent married woman into an affair that is probably going to cause many people a good deal of pain?
Why is it that people so smart, educated and talented fall prey so easily to the Putins? A. When you have Turgenev's Fathers and Sons and Chekhov's Lady With Lapdog, who needs democracy?
There was no one outside, save for an older woman with lapdog and a bellhop.
Ultimately the love games in "The Lady With a Lapdog" lead Anna and Gurov to a confrontation with their own mortality.
I walked the next day in the Jardin du Luxembourg and passed two middle-aged women wrapped in furs and with lapdogs on leads.
"Their interest is in lapdog confidences and dining with the powerful.
