The Telegraph has an amiable piece looking back at what made the news on the eve of the First World War. You know the sort of thing: "the occasion of “mixed bathing in Weymouth” was to make a current item in the news pages", we are told, before learning that "Mrs Patrick Campbell was invoked in court on the eve of the war to prove that a driver charged with “exceeding the motor-car speed limit” (20mph) was really driving “very carefully”" and then discovering that Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst's "black silk dress, relieved by touches of white lace, and her bonnet were undisturbed" after an altercation with the police. For those of you who like that sort of thing ...
But I noticed the piece on the same day that I saw this from Bryony Gordon. It starts "Here’s your starter for 10: which member of David Cameron’s new “female-friendly” Cabinet came up to me at a party four years ago and called me a word I hope he never uses in Parliament?" (The word was 'slut'.) One has to suppose that at some level Mrs Pankhurst was aiming to create a world safe for Bryony Gordons, but I suspect not a conscious level.
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