The Finishing Touch
Aug 2013 · Faber & Faber
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The tweedy Miss Hetty Braid worships the lovely but selfish Miss Antonia Mount, her co-proprietor at the most exclusive finishing school on the French Riviera. The girls they teach are quite remarkable, though hardly in the sense of academic distinction. But trouble looms when Antonia announces that 'Royalty is coming.' The great day arrives, and though at first things go tolerably well, disaster springs from good intentions.
This Faber Finds edition includes a 1987 introduction by Brigid Brophy and a new preface by Sir Peter Stothard.
'A wicked little entertainment... plaubly not meant for the moralists or naive.' Evening Standard
'An outrageously indelicate joke made in beautifully mannered prose.' Daily Herald
'Waspish and witty.' TLS
This Faber Finds edition includes a 1987 introduction by Brigid Brophy and a new preface by Sir Peter Stothard.
'A wicked little entertainment... plaubly not meant for the moralists or naive.' Evening Standard
'An outrageously indelicate joke made in beautifully mannered prose.' Daily Herald
'Waspish and witty.' TLS
The tweedy Miss Hetty Braid worships the lovely but selfish Miss Antonia Mount, her co-proprietor at the most exclusive finishing school on the French Riviera. The girls they teach are quite remarkable, though hardly in the sense of academic distinction. But trouble looms when Antonia announces t...
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1 review
Monkfish2 Monkfish2
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April 13, 2026
Brophy wrote this racing to finish before her husband recovered from chicken pox. The spark was Sir Anthony Blunt, head of the Courtauld Institute: elegant, bilingual, exhausted, surrounded by young men who were probably sailors, probably students of Poussin, very likely both. She changed his sex, put him on the Riviera, gave him a finishing school to run. Antonia Mount presides with the authority of a retired deity and an interest in her pupils the prospectus covers with heroic discretion. Hetty Braid is baritone where Antonia is soprano, stout where Antonia is frail. Pupils include Regina Outre-Mer, writing ANTONIA MOUNT on mauve blotting paper after Racine, and Fraise du Bois, sustained pharmaceutically in the asparagus trench. A destroyer delivers an English princess. A wasp supplies the hinge. A contraband camera supplies the front page. The school finishes girls in both senses. Blunt was a Soviet spy. Fiction knew first. Read this before a television series ruins it. ❤️ 🇮🇱
About the author
Brigid Brophy
Brigid Brophy
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