News about Barbara Cartland

The heroic founder of the Handwritten Letter Appreciation Society, Dinah Johnson, fears that the Royal Mail 's proposal to reduce delivery days to two or three a week will spell the end of the letter. 'This is how you get to the death of letter-writing. I didn't think when I set up the society that there would be a scenario where the service is threatened, but it is.' So just how well do you know your letters? Take the test and find out...

The magic of Megeve, which was just a medieval French Alpine village when its cobbled streets caught Baroness Noemie de Rothschild's eye a century ago. It has been in demand with successive generations of Rothschilds, as well as, more recently, with Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes, not to mention the Duchess of York, who has thrashed its slopes from time to time. However, one habitue warns me that Earl and Countes Cowley, who own the opulent six-bedroom, five-bathroom Chalet Valentine on Mont d'Arbois, is now out of reach. 'It's dripping with cash.'

"I should have married her in the first place," my father said to me a year after my mother died.' Dad, thanks for the memory. However, looking back, there were moments when my parents' 45-year marriage was in such blissful harmony. Nor was the dig particularly unusual. My younger brother was released relatively lightly, but then my father always wanted a boy. Despite the tumultuous atmosphere at home, Stanley and Marjorie's parents, stayed together through thick and thin, perhaps because this was the way things were then. However, far from inspiring me to embrace a life in a war zone, their tenacity made me vow never to relive an innocent child trapped in a war zone.

A growing number of brands are finally sliding an attractive green option into our knicker drawers and the latest batch is closer to the pretty little things you might find at La Perla or Coco de Mer (though for significantly less cash! (askeptic, nay)

At auction, a hand-stitched book in which Princess Diana's great-grandmother Adelaide Seymour listed the names of all her dance partners during the London season has sold at auction. Miss AHE Seymour's Victorian diary, Balls & My Partners, was one of 343 lots sold last week by Lay's Auctioneers, Penzance, Cornwall, raising more than £250,000 for renowned antiques collector Peter Hone. Mr Hone, 82, who lives in Maida Vale, London, was absolutely elated last night.' I'm absolutely elated.' I'm overjoyed here. It's been the highlight of my life.

For the first time in, well, even more than ever, Lysette Anthony sounds like a winner. The 'impossibly gorgeous' Marcus Gilbert, with whom she now admits to having a brief affair three decades ago on the set of Barbara Cartland's A Ghost in Monte Carlo, wrote to her shortly before Christmas.' 'Someone told him I had Parkinson's,' says Lysette, who reported she had the dreadful disease in May last year. "Let me know if you want to have a coffee," he said. If you're too drained, I can understand." Marcus does this because he does. He's extremely generous.

The teen Diana adored Cartland's books, historical romances about wide-eyed heroes and brooding highwaymen, French counts, and Scottish lairds. There's a young picture of her (pictured) curled in an armchair, Cartland on hand, with a few others scattered about the cushion, as well as a few others scattered about the room. 'Everyone I dreamed of, everything I aspired for,' she's would say years later.' Diana and Charles were photographed inset on their wedding day, and they were shot inset.

After a £400K 'teapot' was discovered after 50 years in a filthy attic, Bargain Hunt host Natasha Raskin Sharp begged viewers to check their lofts. During a recent episode in which the antique was revealed to be a "rare Chinese wine ewer," the host, 36, revealed the 'absolute Bargain Hunt find.' Charles Hanson, a auctioneer, described the yellow floral item as'very sacred, very important, and extremely rare.'

When she picked up the 1873 tea service set in a store and said she'had to have it,' an Antiques Road Trip specialist was asked whether she was really the owner of a vintage tea set, earning a substantial sum when she took it to auction. Natasha Raskin Sharp was unable to say anything after it was sold. Natasha gushed as the Victorian set caught her eye: 'I can't even cope with it,' she said. I don't think I've ever described a tea server before as heady, but this is a heady affair. The pink is the first of all the palette.

Ian McCorquodale, the son of Dame Barbara Cartland and half-brother Raine Spencer, Princess Diana's stepmother, died at the age of 85. After Dame Barbara's death in 2000, he began releasing The Barbara Cartland Pink Collection, 160 previously unpublished manuscripts, as books and e-books (left and centre with his mother). And although his mother may have been dubbed the "Queen of Romance," he suffered with his own romantic highs and lows before finally falling in love with a former Royal Ballet principal dancer who was 22 years old (right, with his second wife).

RICHARD EDEN: Eton College has produced 20 prime ministers and innumerable Cabinet ministers, as well as Princes William and Harry. Lilibet, Princess Charlotte or Harry's daughter, will be educated shortly. The Berkshire boarding school is undergoing a radical reform in its 600-year history by admitting girls.

Raine McCorquodale, neither aristocratic nor wealthy at her birth on September 9, 1929, was Barbara Cartland's daughter, who assiduously tried to tell her daughter what she wanted to hear: titled. Raine was able to be present to King George VI at the first ceremony since the war, and she continued to do it after positioning her as the year's debutante. Raine married Hon Gerald Legge (heir to an earldom). William, born in 1949 and Rupert in 1953, a smart home in Belgravia, Central London, was decorated by society interior designer David Hicks. (Her other two children with Legge, Charlotte, and Henry were born over a decade ago.)

Remember Raine Spencer, daughter of Barbara Cartland and stepmother of Princess Diana? I vaguely recall being a 1980s tabloid hate figure known for her forbidding demeanor and long hair. She had such long hair that she almost created her own hole in the ozone layer directly over her house. But her life was long, fascinating, and full of events, not least her three marriages to earls or counts, making her a countess three times more than average women of the age. "Nobody is a countess three times by accident," Julian Fellowes said of her. Fellowes was a friend of her own, and I'm sure Tina Gaudoin would be able to do so as her book is notably pro-Raine and comes out as broadly pro-Raine, although her eccentricities and strangenesses are not discussed. Gaudoin is an old journalistic hand, and she knows that a book like this has to rumble on at some speed. Well, you won't hear the commotion. It's a much smoother ride than that, not unlike a Bentley gunning it down the M4 at 95 mph.

TOM LEONARD: Elinor Glyn, a novelist, invented the 'It Girl,' and is often credited with inventing the Hollywood sex scene. Despite the fact that her later life resembled one of her books' more improvable plots, Glyn - author Hilary Hallett of Inventing The It Girl - began as a respected member of the Home Counties landed gentry who was largely insecure about her passionless Edwardian marriage, expressing a great deal of sexual apprehension.