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She selected her friends from the intelligentsia, could be aloof and frosty, and admitted she was easily bored. She was in Downing Street during the Suez crisis of 1956, when she famously said that it felt as though the Suez Canal was flowing through her drawing room. She read their books, studied their art and had a clear understanding of what they were trying to achieve.Īfter her marriage, she entered an altogether different world, peopled by Cabinet ministers such as Harold Macmillan, “Rab” Butler and Selwyn Lloyd, and figures such as the Mountbattens, and found herself entertaining or being entertained by Bulganin, Khrushchev, Nehru, Eisenhower and General de Gaulle.
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The list of those whose path she crossed in her early life ranged from Jean Cocteau and the composer Nicolas Nabokov to Edith Sitwell and Orson Welles. A fragile-looking haute bohemian beauty in youth, with fair hair and pallid skin, she was also an intellectual with highly developed tastes in literature, art, music and design.īefore her marriage she had received close attention from figures such as Evelyn Waugh, James Pope-Hennessy, Cecil Beaton, Cyril Connolly, Duff Cooper, Lord Berners, Lucian Freud, Greta Garbo and Isaiah Berlin. In recent years she was not widely known to the general public and certainly she did not enjoy any of the benefits accorded to the widows of other prime ministers.
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The Countess of Avon, who has died aged 101, was the widow of Anthony Eden, Conservative Prime Minister from 1955 to 1957 (later the 1st Earl of Avon), and the most unusual of all the political wives who have occupied 10 Downing Street.