Anne de Courcy

“The young Winston Churchill used to stand in the doorway of a ballroom, rating female looks on the Helen of Troy basis: ‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?’ he would ask a friend standing with him, receiving in answer a murmured: ‘Two hundred ships?’ as a young woman passed. ‘By no means,’ Winston would respond. ‘A covered sampan or a small gunboat at most.”
― Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy

“The audience consisted of young toughs from the shops and the banks and that type of ageing ex-serviceman who has pathetically retained his military rank from the war. It was the people of England who, in Chesterton’s poem, have not yet spoken. God help England if they ever do, for they are a mass of prejudice, ignorance, intolerance and cruelty.”
― Anne de Courcy, The Viceroy's Daughters