"Is that why you suddenly start speaking french all the time for no reason?" God, she's spectacular.

No, that person is a boldly obvious troll, and you tiresomely fell for it.

I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that, for example, completely disparate countries like Germany and Spain share a lot more culturally and historically than say, Canada and Mexico. So, yes.

I hope this is the Rosamund Pike vehicle I've been waiting for! She is just completely magnificent, and her voice is like a bell. I think I've only seen her in Pride & Prejudice, An Education and Love in a Cold Climate's tv series, all middling period pieces, but she stole the show in each one. Good luck her.

Nobody thinks Europe is a country. People speak as though Europe is a country (in fact just referring to Europe as a hole) because it has a union of states (hmm, sounds misleadingly familiar) and a common currency but mainly is just far more culturally homogenous and much smaller than either Africa or Asia (or North…

There's the shadenfreude aspect, and then there's also the wanting it to be true because if he IS really like this, he deserves this exposure, and if he ISN'T like this, then this story is a bunch of shitty shit that just makes everyone look bad. So it's, in a way, noble to root for this sort of story being true.…

"I'm not racist! Some of my staff are from racialized groups!" didn't even fly in 1860.

It's still a good first marriage for her. :)

Cynical joke, but it's true. I get what you're saying, but the union increases her power. Not in a tangible way maybe, but it's certainly an amplified arena for her in which to be magnificent. It doesn't really increase his power.

There's another wonderful smashup series from 2001 by Tom Hooper (who won an Oscar for the King's Speech) with the radiantly wonderful Rosamund Pike as Fanny. It's great.

Don't know where it was claimed that it should be admired. Too often the small minded confuse empathy with sympathy.

You might be the willfully ignorant one here, since most of them bitterly regretted that they were not permitted to be educated for their entire lives, which was entirely the norm for girls at the time.

That aspect of Diana and Oswald Mosley's life stories is pretty fascinating. I mean, they were both obviously very intelligent people and were wholly unable to admit that they'd wasted their potential on a horrendous lie. They stuck to it, eloquently and with a lot of back-pedeling of the less savoury bits until the…

My favorite Mitford anecdote is when Nancy had a stomach tumour, joked that it was her ingrown baby twin and called it Lord Redesdale.

She's the daughter of her first son with Bryan Guinness.

There's an excellent 6-way biography on them by Mary Lovell, and Deborah's memoir is in my opinion the best. She's very funny and you get a big sense of the family goings on from it. Diana (Mosley's) memoir is also extremely well-written, but her life story is a little more problematic and it's difficult to read it…

More than once in the past I've googled to make sure Debo Mitford was still alive. Her memoir was fantastic and she just seemed so hilarious. Total offshoot but it's odd to imagine that not-so-long from now there will be nobody left who remembers the interwar or WWII years.

It's sort of believed that Jane Austin based Pemberley on Chatsworth, it being "the" important house in Derbyshire as Pemberley is described. There are quite a few non-titled families who live(d) in houses as fly as Chatsworth.

She got held up at a border in Brazil because her passport said Her Grace Deborah Vivien Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire" and she was like "yup, those are all me."

Hitler was v superstitious and believed all this stuff meant that she was destined to be in his life although there's no reason to believe they had any sort of intimate relationship. Because she would have talked about it. It's hard to fault his logic [on that.]

It seems to me that additional (or any) information surrounding the accusation (completely anonymous for the victim, of course) would lend credence to this list, especially when there's this opaque and illogical "rapist-grading" system. It would add weight to what could otherwise be hearsay of widely varying degrees,…