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2025

  • Daphne du Maurier: The King's General
  • Deborah Lawrenson: The Secretary
  • Richard Cohen: How to Write like Tolstoy
  • Adrian Tinniswood: Noble Ambitions
  • Adrian Tinniswood: The Power and the Glory
  • Martin Williams: The King is Dead, Long Live the King
  • Gavin Plumley: A Home for all Seasons
  • Robert Harris: Precipice
  • Nigel Slater: A Thousand Feasts
  • Joan Aiken: Tales of London Town
  • Alan Connor: 188 Words for Rain
  • Ben Robinson: English Villages: An Extraordinary Journey through Time

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Cornflower book group

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Joan Kyler

Now I know what to do with all my velvet and sparkly dresses! We used to be much more social when we lived in Boston, so the clothes were appropriate. But times change. I'll wow our neighbors by working in the garden in posh evening wear! I'll just tell them I'm channeling Edwardian ladies!

Cornflower

Excellent idea, Joan!

Freda

Oh, the dresses!

Cornflower

The author says, "I marvel how we put up with the inconvenience of the clothes we wore. Huge hats pinned on with hat pins over our fluffled*-out coiffures, reared up on our heads in a high wind, our long cumbersome skirts with the stiff underskirts picked up mud and grit from pavements and roads. When we clambered into a hansom cab we had somehow to keep our skirts from touching its high muddy wheel - no easy task. We wore feather boas which streamed in every direction, becoming uncurled and damp in rain. We meekly put up with all this, never questioning our absurd bondage. Yet the clothes were pretty and enhancing to those women who knew how to wear them with real elegance."
*Good word.

Toffeeapple

My parents, having been born in 1900 and 1904 must have been Edwardian themselves. Strange to think of it all these years later.

I shall immediately snaffle the word 'Fluffled' it is an excellent word.

Cornflower

It is a good word!

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