The seventh Duke of Wellington is an unstuffy former diplomat and minor architect, onetime Surveyor of the King's Works of Art (1936-43) and a man who likes to keep the records straight about his most famous ancestor. As a close student of his tough, gunpowdery great-grandfather, he came to doubt that the first Duke ever uttered the sonorous bit of snobbery so dear to generations of British orators: "The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton." So last month he did what any Englishman would do under the circumstances: he wrote a letter to the...
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