His wife retains a blind fondness for the family's oldest retainer, in effect a slave procured as a child to raise her children and cook the delicious dishes of his impoverished background, a situation that will bring about a tragedy of injustice and misplaced loyalty worthy of Conrad at his darkest.
In the thoroughly un-festive ending, a newly evil Blackadder insults the queen and Prince Albert, then sends his retainer on an errand to the butcher's shop.
What this means is that a truly fascinating picture by Rubens – his fantastical, ingenious portrait of Marchesa aria Grimaldi, and her Dwarf (c 1606) in which a ruff collar takes on the proportions and complexity of the Milky Way and the beautiful Grimaldi is closely accompanied by her jowly retainer – is shown among a host of lesser works.
If unbundling fees means firms having to pay a fat retainer for advisory work, so be it.
A FTSE 100 company in Britain will typically pay its main PR firm £100,000-150,000 a year as a retainer.
When he visits Bangladesh in September, Mr Singh, the Gandhi family retainer, would do well to make wider contact if India's newly improving relations are not one day to take another big dive for the worse.The Economist has received a letter from the government of Bangladesh in response to this article.
They are also cutting back on "development" contracts, where writers were kept on retainer while working on new programmes.Now Hollywood is bracing itself again: actors are soon due to start negotiating with studios to renew their contract, which expires in June 2008.
It is currently on loan to a loyal and honest retainer, Manmohan Singh, no mean driver for a man of his years.
A study of British jockeys suggested they were more likely to win if they were paid out of prize money than if they were kept on retainer.
Mr Bush almost scuppered the whole project when he nominated a lightweight family retainer, Harriet Miers, to fill Ms O'Connor's seat.
Much power is devolved to the states; the fissiparous nature of its polity means that deals have constantly to be done with a vast array of regional and caste-based parties; and a colonial and socialist past has bequeathed India a bureaucracy whose direction is hard to change.Mr Singh, who was not much more than a Gandhi family retainer, had little chance of doing so.
