INTIMACIES OF COURT AND SOCIETY.
The anonymous author of Intimacies of Court and Society, by the Widow of a Diplomat (Hurst and Blackett, 10s. 6d. net), has been unfortunate in her choice of title, for it does her recollections of life at five European Courts considerably less than justice, by suggesting just the traditional gleanings of unfathered indiscre- tions and backstair scandal which with diplomatic reserve or natural good taste she has most carefully eschewed. Tainted neither by malice nor by insipidity, these reminiscences give interesting and often subtly delicate pictures of Paris, with its bewildering, factitious brilliance, the pageantry and squalor of
Rome, the bankrupt extravagance and madcap generosity of St. Petersburg, the brand-new medievalism of Berlin ceremony, and London's sombre magic. " The Widow of a Diplomat" writes with ease, tempered judgment, nimble wit, and a tact not always displayed, even in their embassies, by her Transatlantic country- men. Lady Dorothy Nevill—strangely omitted, by the way, in the author's glimpse of English society—has found, in the quarter whence it was least to be expected, a younger but not less enter- taining echo.
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