…a Monty Python moment; life imitating art. The following sentence, in Deborah Mitford’s memoirs, about James Lees-Milne:
It is a pity that people reading about him now are told of his sexual proclivities and seem to overlook the work he did for the National Trust during and after the war.
A Bad Guide 
“people reading about him ….. seem to overlook the work he did for the National Trust”: this is drivel. As in: tear it up, throw it in the bin and declaim “have another go and resubmit by Friday at 6pm” drivel.
On a par with the tabloids.
Sex shame of celeb, EXCLUSIVE! (More photos on pages 6,7,8,12,14,18,24,32…)
A suggested rewrite for maximum prurience :
“It is a pity that people reading about him now are told of his sexual proclivities and seem to overlook the work he did for the National Trust during and after the whore.”
Nah. My point is that it’s not the readers who are doing the overlooking, but the writers. She probably means something like “It is a pity that those writing about him make more fuss about his being a poof than about his sterling efforts for the National Trust.” There are lots of poofs, but his efforts for the NT probably were unique, so her intended point is fair. Added to which, his sex life is his business (though that unfortunately wasn’t so de jure at the time), his public life is ours.
P.S. His “Ancestral Voices” is an entertaining read.
I like the irrelevance of both — to each other and to anything else.
I feel the world would be a lot poorer without people like him. Rudolf Steiner incidentally wore a similar bouquet garni around his neck: http://www.heyokamagazine.com/Rudolf-Steiner.jpg
So did Ffrank Lloyd Wright. I liked my original picture, but not for this piece. I admit that I know very little about James Lees-Milne, except that he had sexual proclivities and worked for the National Trust. And that in later life he & his wife were tyrannised by their landlord, the Duke of Beaufort, because they didn’t like fox-hunting.
“bouquet garni around his neck”: I used to have a rather fine collection of cravats which my wife – as she then wasn’t – threw out, on the indisputable grounds that “You are not one of The Few”.
What Steiner and Wright are wearing: is it a cravat, or a foulard subdued by a collar ? What is the proper designation ?
Foulard seems to be a kind of printed silk for making ties with. I think of a cravat as this — as Dearie’s wife says, the sort of thing Biggles would wear. Bouquet garni around the neck may not be the correct name, but we’re not going to find a better one.
Here is a picture of a foulard. It’s usually tied off-center I think, as shown. Your cravat is arranged symmetrically and seems to be invaginated, not tied. But if that black padding in the picture is to be worn under the cravat, that would constrict breathing, wouldn’t it ?
Grumbly, I didn’t know this word “invaginated”, so thanks for that. Yes, it’s simply turned back on itself, like in the first stage of knotting a tie. I can’t see any black padding. My guess is that the Steiner & Wright tie is pre-tied and you just have to hook it up when you put it on. It’s beginning to bother me that I don’t know its proper name; it probably comes up in late Victorian literature all the time and I just skip over it. I like the derivation of “cravat”:
You’re never going to pin these words down. “Cravat” can be either a bit of Croatian miltary neckwear from which many other things are descended, or a catchall term for all those other things. (Are birds dinosaurs?) “Foulard” can be a fabric, or one or another kind of neckwear made of that fabric, or some other things.
I rarely touch the stuff, but I’m glad the word “foulard” has surfaced; it had been on the tip of my tongue ever since that first picture of the proclivity guy appeared.
Should I put the first picture back? I didn’t want it to look like I was laughing at him.
“Foulard” can be a fabric, or one or another kind of neckwear made of that fabric, or some other things.
Can you name one such other thing ? I suspect this to be an empty claim.
Why not put both pictures up: proclivity “before and after” ?
Or “before and after the National Trust”.
Okay, I’ll try the latter (one moment please) …
That’s better now. There was indeed a touch of “laughing at him” in the first version, I don’t quite know why it struck me that way. Poor old dear – I have always had a tender spot (not a woody) in my heart for those aging gentlemen of a certain persuasion, such as Quentin Crisp. They have to be made of steel to survive all the crap thown at them in the course of their lives. I learned a lot about perduration from the old queens among the people I hung out with in the bars of El Paso when I was 14.
I do too. I knew a couple in London when I was young.
It was an empty claim, but no more. Will this do?
I don’t mean that it was no more than an empty claim. I mean that it is an empty claim no more. I should have written “no longer”.
It’s still an empty claim in the sense that’s a claim by a person known to us as Ø or “Empty”.
In French, un foulard is a type of square kerchief: it can be worn over the head (many women wear one when going to church) or around the neck. The picture had a fancy knot, worn asymmetrically, but that is not necessary to the meaning of foulard. By extension, the word is used for the type of silk fabric suitable for this accessory, but a foulard can also be made of cotton.
So the fabric is named after the scarf, and not the other way round.
Any idea what that floppy tie is called, m-l?
>A. J. P. Crown
Foulard.- Uncertain origin ; probably from the verb « fouler » :
http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/foulard
AJP, I think that the floppy tie on the aged Lees-Milne is une lavallière.
This style of tie was popular among artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When painting, etc they wore an ample white smock over their regular clothes, and a black lavallière. My father has a photograph in which his grandfather and one of his brothers (in their twenties at the time), who had gone (or were about to go) to Italy together to study painting, are dressed in this “artist uniform”. But it is difficult to find illustrations of actual artists wearing it, since they usually posed for photographs in “civilian” clothes: on Wikipedia I found the picture of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé wearing a lavallière, and in the French article on Rodin there is a photo of him where he seems to be wearing the “uniform” (the second photo, which is not in the corresponding English article), although since that photo is in profile, it is hard to identify the tie with precision.
I think that this sort of tie was popular with artists because it was looser and easier to knot than the more common styles of ties worn during that period.
Ah, well that settles that. You can’t beat real French when it comes to naming things.
Or for lending us the names. So they tied them, they weren’t pre-tied. Have you ever seen one, m-l? What shape are they when they’re laid flat?
Proust writes about the dubious M.Legrandin (described as ‘a Saint Sebastian of snobbishness’): ‘And a polka-dotted lavaliere bow tie tossed by the wind in the square continued to float in front of Legrandin like the flag of his proud isolation and noble independence.’
I.e. it’s the emblem of a snob who pretends he isn’t one.
That’s interesting. There’s probably some satisfaction just in knowing how to tie it. I can’t imagine ever wanting to wear one, but even so, it’s good to know what they stand for. I expect James Lees-Milne knew.
AJP, look up lavallière on Wikipedia.fr to see one worn by a woman. It seems to be basically a long, narrow scarf. The knot seems to be an ordinary one, as in tying shoelaces.
The article says that it started (in the 19th C) as a woman’s accessory before being adopted by artists, students and intellectuals.
Thanks, I will. That’s quite unusual for men to adopt an item of women’s clothing.
Indeed. But wikipedia is not always totally reliable.