A small clipping dated 1981 records the death of Sir Alan Lascelles, giving the opinion that he only made one major blunder in his career, about which there may be two opinions. Anyway, the blunder mentioned in this case was his advice to the present Queen to visit Edinburgh in 1953 wearing day clothes. The Scots, all dressed up for the occasion, took deep offence. I have always thought that, even in these more egalitarian days, it is very hard for a Queen ever to be over-dressed, whereas being under-dressed can be tricky. The Times obituary of Lascelles, also present here, is straightforward save for one comment, that he had for many years been a member of the Travellers Club "but reigned immediately when ladies were given certain rights there". Hmm!

Three years before he died, Sir Alan gave a luncheon for the three other ex-Royal Private Secretaries then alive, according to a cutting from the Sunday Telegraph. Four had never been alive at the same time before. They were Lascelles, Adeane, Charteris and Moore.

Lady Emily Lutyens' book A Blessed Girl is dredged for a quotation seemingly out of character for one related by marriage to various courtiers: " She [Queen Victoria] is the only one of the Royal Family for whom I have any respect. From all I have heard of her, in spite of her age and ugliness, she yet looks and behaves like a queen, instead of like a dreadfully vulgar shop-keeper, which all the others I have seen behave like ……. The Queen, although she was so tiny, gave an impression of tremendous dignity."

Miss Gray seems to have had to pay a fair sum for her copy of Anna Stancioff's Recollections of a Bulgarian Diplomat's Wife, always a hard book to find but essential for late nineteenth century Bulgaria. Loosely inserted in her copy is a rather handsome photograph of King Ferdinand with a caption stating that Queen Victoria thought him "totally unfit", presumably to rule. It is, of course, just possible that the Queen did not realise quite what qualities were required to rule that nation at that time. A.J.Sylvester, in his Life with Lloyd George, quotes his boss as saying in May, 1933 that Ferdinand loathed the Kaiser. "One day, when the Kaiser was staying at Sofia, Ferdinand was leaning on a wall, which overlooked a wonderful panoramic view. He had a big posterior. The Kaiser went quietly behind him and gave him a big smack on his bottom. Ferdinand never forgave him for that action." Clare Sheridan features again here: she seems to have been a lady who knew all the royal families and had little good to say of them. In this instance she describes King Boris, Ferdinand's son, as having " a narrow, aristocratic face, long tapering hands and was wearing four gold bracelets and six jewelled rings ….. His chief interest was in trains. He judged a country by the condition of its lines of communication, but also its engines."

Tipped into Stella King's Princess Marina is a 40th birthday interview with Princess Michael of Kent conducted by Grania Forbes in January 1985. MC, as the Princess says she is known in the Royal Family, comes across pretty well. She says the late Earl Mounbatten told her it would take her five years to be accepted after she married in 1978 and she seemed to think she now was liked. "It was a terrible blow when [Mountbatten] died, not only for the country but for us because we lost our great supporter in household circles, in family circles and in society circles who could explain a great many things that thereafter

were not explained." Even in 1985, Princess Michael, unlike almost all other British Royals, was perfectly prepared to discuss financial matters, for even then they were not on the Civil List. She pinned some of least of her hopes on her literary output, a hope which was not, I think, quite fulfilled. Ms. King quotes Prince Louis Ferdinand's father urging him on to propose to Princess Marina, but the vital spark failed to kindle. An interpolation, quoting from Bruce Lockhart, quotes Louis Ferdinand as saying that Prince George of Kent was not in love with Marina, but contradicts this on the authority of Freda Dudley Ward, the Prince of Wales's mistress, who said he was much in love. An extract from Cecil Beaton's Diaries harks back to pre-war years in his assessment of Marina: "Those who had the good fortune to meet her on her arrival in England could see the cool classical features in a perfect oval head held high on a straight column of neck, the topaz eyes, the slightly tilted smile, the apricot complexion, and the nut brown cap of flat silken curls. We soon knew that she was a character of great gentleness and modesty, with a natural gift for draughtsmanship and a love of music. She enjoyed the company of creative talent. Then, one dark wartime night, at a tragically early age, she became a widow; for hours on end she remained speechless and motionless as she stared out of the window."

An unattributed cutting reveals that the Duke and Duchess of Kent were in Austria, presumably just before the war, Prince George wished to visit his brother, the exiled Duke of Windsor and his wife, at their home at Wasserleonburg. Marina flatly refused to go, even when George VI added his voice to the Duke of Kent's. This led to an estrangement between the Dukes of Windsor and Kent. Lord [Kenneth] Clark is quoted as saying that Marina was the most elegant example of classical beauty he had known: "she could have sat for Praxiteles, although she was not a particularly animated beauty". Scattered through the book are newspaper cuttings of photographs of Princess Marina and of her daughter Alexandra, who, particularly from certain angles, look remarkably alike. It is also evident how much the exquisite grooming of the mother rubbed off on the daughter.

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