Disdainful of the hyperactive micromanagement associated with Gordon Brown and Mr Blair, he generally left ministers and civil servants alone.
Rachel Fuchs, of Arizona State University, writes that women who committed infanticide in the nineteenth century "were generally young, single domestic servants... alone and lacking family support, filled with shame, afraid to dishonor themselves and their families, and abandoned by their lovers".
After debt repayments and investment in oil, there will be little left for the government to pay its army of public servants, let alone the country's twitchy soldiers.
In 1764, the Gentleman's Magazine reckoned there were 20,000 "negroe servants" in London alone.
He was a bachelor and, except for servants, he lived alone with gradually failing eyesight.
Guggenheim, a gregarious sixty-year-old who favors Indonesian shirts, was now living virtually alone, amid servants, in the palace.
"He can't sleep alone without a servant to look after him.
Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard ends with the aged servant Firs, a former serf, alone on the deserted stage.
For one thing, the grandmother, Fatma, is less like a salty Broadway matriarch than a Turkish Miss Havisham, embittered and trapped in the past, haunting the decaying mansion outside Istanbul where she lives alone with her servant, a dwarf who also happens to be her late husband's illegitimate son.
His parents were away and he and his sister, Noni, 6, were alone with the servants.
