The iconic clipper ship Cutty Sark has come back to life in her new Greenwich dry dock on the eastern edge of London, not far from where tea clippers once brought endless cargos of tea into the warehouses of the East India Company. Her journey here was not without incident, and we are fortunate to have…
I was delighted to spend a leisurely August afternoon with my writing partner Jane Pettigrew at one of the most stylish of all London hotels—Claridges. On the way, Soho traffic became so snarled that we had to abandon our cab and walk a few blocks. Finally, fifteen minutes late and a bit stressed, we were greeted…
In 1890, Harry Gordon Selfridge, manager of Marshall Field’s in Chicago, enrolled the help of Sarah Haring to assist with a new project at the store. She was in many ways, a typical American woman of her era—wife of a businessman and a mother. Neither aristocratic nor impoverished, Haring was needed to recruit “gentlewomen” who…