"... and the back of a Valkyrie"

Jutting from a new load of books outside AA Furniture & Appliance is a hard cover U.S. first edition of Sarah Harrison's Bloomsbury-era romance novel An Imperfect Lady (Warner, 1988). From the back jacket copy we are introduced to Adeline Gundry's dress, which is of "black satin velvet, patterned with enormous roses." Never mind the colour of these roses, Adeline's dress is "designed to show off the good points of a tall, dark-haired woman with a long neck, an imposing bust, a fine set of soldiers, and the back of a Valkyrie." If that isn't enough, consider Adeline's make-up: "her reddest lipstick, her most dramatic eye shadow, and her palest, most luminous powder." Shoes? "Her four inch heels took her to well over six feet, but she had towered over people for as long as she could remember, and like many a tall daughter of a tall mother, didn't care."

Not caring was never a luxury among young Edwardians, not if you were born well enough, as Adeline was. Indeed, not caring was an existential necessity, a family-issued armament designed to protect you from your friends, your lovers and your peers, who saw emotional displays as a sign of weakness, the proverbial tipping of the hand. Britain's early 20th century landed class was most brutal when it came to intra-class relations, which I believe was a consequence of boredom and an anxiety brought on by a declining empire, social reforms and boarding schools like Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse and Cheltenham. Oddly enough, variants of boredom and anxiety are equally common today, but instead of playing it cool like the Brits did, it's a screaming match food fight messy bedroom free-for-all rehearsed daily in the ebb and flow of the interweb, its algorithms and its bots. Those who think the world will end with the super rich holed up on some mountaintop should know that that battle is also in its planning stages, with their political dupes the last to go.