The Observer’s late, brilliant columnist on how to navigate etiquette, from hosting a party to losing your knickers
The Observer Magazine cover story of 12 May 1968 by Katharine Whitehorn, who died earlier this month aged 92, was typically forthright, witty and wise (‘Social bloomers and how to get out of them’).
Billed as ‘the guide you actually need to the present-day
comedy of manners’, Whitehorn opened with some of her own social solecisms with comic candour: ‘I speak as one who first went into a smart hairdresser and knelt at the backwash.’