Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime

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Glamour

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Cercle de l’Union interalliée

The cercle de l'Union interalliée, also known as the Cercle interallié is a social and dining club established in 1917 at No. 33 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, France with Ferdinand Foch, Marshal of France, as its second president. It adjoins the embassies of Britain and Japan. The 3,100-member club has many international members and is frequently used for business conferences by organizations such as the WTO, Bank of England, Wharton Club of Paris, Forbes magazine and Radley College.

Lady Killearn

The Dowager Lady Killearn, who has died aged 105, remained, in old age, as vivacious, colourful and controversial as she had been as the glamorous young wife of Britain’s wartime ambassador to Cairo. An only child, Jacqueline Aldine Leslie Castellani was born in Ceylon on January 13 1910. Her mother was a Yorkshire Protestant, but Jacqueline took more after her Italian father, Sir Aldo Castellani, a flamboyant Florentine bacteriologist turned Harley Street doctor who discovered the parasite that transmits sleeping sickness, pioneered various vaccinations and founded the International Society of Dermatology. Sir Aldo was a raconteur, monarchist and snob, and his roll-call of patients included Rudolph Valentino, Elsa Schiaparelli, Guglielmo Marconi and Umberto, the deposed king of Italy. At the time of Jacqueline’s birth her father was head of the British government clinic for tropical diseases in Ceylon. A great dancer and a great flirt, in due course she was presented at Court in London, and was one of the outstanding debutantes of her year. Her fragile, porcelain-doll beauty, her exotic and sophisticated background and her vivacity won her many followers.

China Machado

China Machado, a model, muse and editor who was one of the first women to break high fashion's color barrier, has died at 86. At 19, she met Luis Miguel Dominguín, who was the most famous bullfighter in the world at the time — Ernest Hemingway's The Dangerous Summer is about Dominguín and his brother. By all accounts, he was immediately smitten. Machado ran off with the dashing bullfighter, scandalizing her family and kicking off two extraordinary years of travel and adventure — partying with Errol Flynn and Pablo Picasso.

Paris Wine Tasting of 1976

The Paris Wine Tasting of 1976 or the Judgment of Paris was a wine competition organized in Paris on 24 May 1976 by Steven Spurrier, a British wine merchant, in which French judges did blind tasting of top-quality chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon wines from France and from California. California wines rated best in each category, which caused surprise as France was generally regarded as being the foremost producer of the world's best wines. Spurrier sold only French wine and believed that the California wines would not win.

Caroline Blackwood

Caroline Blackwood was a writer and artist's muse, and the eldest child of Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness. A well-known figure in the literary world through her journalism and her novels, Caroline Blackwood was equally well-known for her high-profile marriages, first to the artist Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz and finally to the poet Robert Lowell, who described her as "a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers".

Christine Keeler

Christine Keeler is an English former model and showgirl. Her involvement with a British government minister discredited the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan in 1963, in what is known as the Profumo Affair. In July 1961, Ward introduced her to John Profumo, the British Secretary of State for War, at a pool party at Cliveden, the Buckinghamshire mansion owned by Lord Astor. Profumo entered into an affair with Keeler, not realising that she was also sleeping with drug dealer Johnny Edgecombe as well as Yevgeni Ivanov, a naval attaché at the embassy of the Soviet Union.