Martin observes that being Miss Manners requires constant vigilance because people keep finding new ways to be rude. Our constant use of mobile phones leaves her "astonished that so many people appear to be on parole and how strict their parole is," a reference to the banality and frequency of calls home to say "I'm on the train."

Mobile phone excesses aside, however, Martin believes that if you take a broad historical perspective, people are more courteous today. "People are always encouraging me to say, 'Manners have just gone to pieces,' which of course is ridiculous. They forget that the idea of respect only applied to certain people in certain situations.

"There were huge numbers of people - women, blacks, gays - who were treated with disrespect. Even in courtrooms [blacks and women] were addressed by their first name when everybody else was addressed by their last name. [Today] in Washington, where we follow politics because it's the local sport, politicians self-destruct when they fail to realise they can no longer make an ethnic joke or a slur about women."

It worries her that our business and social lives increasingly overlap. "Everything becomes a matter of business; you go to cocktail parties, you go out to (business) dinners - you have no private life because you have a 'fake' private life. It's extremely sad because then you are completely at the mercy of where you are in business."

When Martin was covering embassies for the Post, she was "bombarded and flattered" by invitations. She complained to her husband that if she lost her job the next day, few of these people would invite her.

Martin's husband replied, "If he [the ambassador] lost his job tomorrow, you wouldn't go." The conversation prompted an epiphany: "We decided that the only people who would cross our threshold in our private life would be people we liked or thought we might like."

On the spur of the moment, I had considered asking Martin to dinner but then balked because I thought she might regard it as overly familiar. Propriety had won out over spontaneity. When I tell her, she says, "Oh, I would've loved that!" Is this evidence that etiquette is often a straitjacket?

Martin laughs. "Well, you could have given me the choice and I could have perfectly politely said 'I'm so exhausted' but it sounds like fun."

 "Expressing anger doesn't usually change people's behaviour. It just makes them rude back. You double the amount of rudeness in the world." Her advice is more practical than prissy. "I have no magic formula (but) if you start screaming and yelling they write you off as someone who would never be pleased anyway."

As we wait, I say that I find the courtesy that Americans routinely extend to foreigners, junior employees and staff in restaurants makes the US seem one of the politest places in the world. 

"The English think we're failed English people - that we don't quite get it right, but that's not the case," she says. "The founding fathers of America very deliberately felt that manners in European court society with strict demarcations were not for us. De Toqueville points out that the chief thing about the servant-master relationship in America is that both know that their positions could be reversed tomorrow."

Indeed, I tell Martin that when I was paying for newspapers at a hotel in New Mexico a few weeks earlier, the bellboy saw me looking for change and flipped me a quarter.

"The bellboy tipped you! I love it," she says, laughing out loud.

==

Polite society

By Rahul Jacob

Published: August 30 2008 03:00 | Last updated: August 30 2008 03:00

In No Vulgar Hotel, her celebration of Venice published last year, Judith Martin tells a story about an impatient Venetian matron who, during carnival time, finds a policewoman stopping people from crossing one of the city's bridges. The matron is angry; she is not a tourist, she lives in the neighbourhood, she must be allowed through. The policewoman responds good-naturedly but still the matron keeps up her tirade. When the crowds are allowed to cross, the policewoman hands her a ticket. "What for?" the matron explodes. "Mal educato (being badly brought up)," the policewoman replies.

It is tempting to see the policewoman as an alter ego of Martin, who is better known in the US by her pseudonym Miss Manners. Her column on etiquette is published in about 250 newspapers across America and on MSN.com and her books, such as Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, make her a somewhat intimidating companion to invite for tea.

We get off to a rather unsettling start. I had picked the restaurant at the top of the National Portrait Gallery in London, primarily because it is close to her hotel on the Strand and has pretty views of the roof-tops of Trafalgar Square. Later that afternoon Martin is giving a talk on Venice so we arrange to meet at 2.30pm. But when we arrive, the waitress tells us the restaurant cannot serve tea till 3pm. Happily, she means no sandwiches or scones till then, but we can order something to drink.

As we sit down, I can't help noticing that there are paper napkins on the table. A discomfiting recollection of Miss Manners' disapproval of paper napkins flashes through my mind. ("Dear Miss Manners, why can't I use paper napkins at a dinner party? They look alright. They do the job. It's more practical to throw them away instead of cleaning them." Her reply? "Gentle Reader: identical claims were made for paper undergarments. How come you don't wear them?")

Now 69, Martin has a bouffant of white hair and her eyebrows are almost always arched in amusement. Not only does she have a Wildean gift for biting humour, she looks rather like a character in a revival of an Oscar Wilde play. She appears to me a - more egalitarian - Lady Bracknell for our times. We talk about Venice, where Martin, a native of Washington DC, has lived on and off in recent years. She sees the city as ravishingly beautiful, of course, but also as a comedy of manners in which the residents make sporadic efforts to limit the tourist invasion. Martin tells me of suggestions to fence off St Mark's Square and to charge tourists for entering the square and describes another recently enacted regulation that prohibits the feeding of pigeons. "They really don't see the difference between tourists and pigeons. There are too many about."

When they are in Venice, Martin and her husband, Robert, a molecular biologist, rent a place, rather than a hotel room, for the very Miss Manners reason that they feel they cannot really get to know Venetians unless they are able to entertain them at home. "We go every time of the year except summer because they don't share our belief in air-conditioning," says Martin. "I love going in winter."

As Martin prefers a light tea, I suggest Darjeeling. When it arrives and we have waited for it to steep a while longer, I pour her a cup. "That's what I call tea," she enthuses, "and not what they gave me at breakfast at the hotel." The restaurant has put tea bags in the pot, and I grumble peevishly about how rare it is in London to be served leaf tea. I sound like a tedious coffee snob, but Martin is amused. The waitress takes an order for a selection of sandwiches.

It is three decades since Martin became the arbiter of American manners in columns that first appeared in The Washington Post. Her interest in the subject began as a child. Her father, an economist for the US government, worked on and off for the UN, which meant that her family lived overseas frequently. She recalls how, as a 12-year-old girl, she and her brother were taken around the Egyptian Museum in Cairo by their parents. They chanced upon the translation of a 4,000-year-old letter from a father to his son. "It was a Polonius-type letter. We started to laugh because . . . we could see he knew he had a young scamp on his hands and had to tell him how to behave."

Martin worked at The Washington Post for about three decades, starting in 1958 initially doing clerical jobs. Later, her reporting duties included covering embassy parties and social events at the White House. Well before Watergate brought the Post and the Nixon White House to loggerheads, Martin's coverage of Julie Nixon's wedding to David Eisenhower in 1968 irritated that excessively controlling administration. The Nixon White House gave journalists credentials to attend the reception but then cordoned them off in a room far from the party, asking them to make do with briefings from a staff member and write the story as if they had been at the party. Instead, Martin slipped by the security with the bridesmaids. A few years later, the Post was asked by the White House not to assign Martin to cover Tricia Nixon's wedding. The Post's executive editor at the time, Ben Bradlee, refused and the paper declined to cover the event.

Her column on etiquette started as a sideline in 1978 while she was covering theatre and film for the paper. Soon the letters were flowing in and today Martin continues to answer readers' queries on subjects that extend far beyond table settings and the use of fish forks to how manners in America's South were influenced by African customs, to dealing with "extortionate" gift registries.

Martin observes that being Miss Manners requires constant vigilance because people keep finding new ways to be rude. Our constant use of mobile phones leaves her "astonished that so many people appear to be on parole and how strict their parole is," a reference to the banality and frequency of calls home to say "I'm on the train."

Mobile phone excesses aside, however, Martin believes that if you take a broad historical perspective, people are more courteous today. "People are always encouraging me to say, 'Manners have just gone to pieces,' which of course is ridiculous. They forget that the idea of respect only applied to certain people in certain situations.

"There were huge numbers of people - women, blacks, gays - who were treated with disrespect. Even in courtrooms [blacks and women] were addressed by their first name when everybody else was addressed by their last name. [Today] in Washington, where we follow politics because it's the local sport, politicians self-destruct when they fail to realise they can no longer make an ethnic joke or a slur about women."

It worries her that our business and social lives increasingly overlap. "Everything becomes a matter of business; you go to cocktail parties, you go out to (business) dinners - you have no private life because you have a 'fake' private life. It's extremely sad because then you are completely at the mercy of where you are in business."

When Martin was covering embassies for the Post, she was "bombarded and flattered" by invitations. She complained to her husband that if she lost her job the next day, few of these people would invite her.

Martin's husband replied, "If he [the ambassador] lost his job tomorrow, you wouldn't go." The conversation prompted an epiphany: "We decided that the only people who would cross our threshold in our private life would be people we liked or thought we might like."

This allows me to ask her about a similar dilemma. We had intended to meet the previous evening for a drink but Martin was delayed at the airport and in traffic and we were forced to cancel the plan. As it happened, I had two friends coming to dinner who had worked in Washington DC and enjoyed her writing almost as much as I did. On the spur of the moment, I had considered asking Martin to dinner but then balked because I thought she might regard it as overly familiar. Propriety had won out over spontaneity. When I tell her, she says, "Oh, I would've loved that!" Is this evidence that etiquette is often a straitjacket?

Martin laughs. "Well, you could have given me the choice and I could have perfectly politely said 'I'm so exhausted' but it sounds like fun."

Given Martin's experience at the airport the evening before, I am hoping for a papal dispensation on the subject of complaining forcefully at least at Heathrow. She will have none of it: "Expressing anger doesn't usually change people's behaviour. It just makes them rude back. You double the amount of rudeness in the world." Her advice is more practical than prissy. "I have no magic formula (but) if you start screaming and yelling they write you off as someone who would never be pleased anyway."

Martin's next engagement is across town so I ask her if she needs to leave. She suggests we get the bill and talk more as we walk back towards her hotel. As we wait, I say that I find the courtesy that Americans routinely extend to foreigners, junior employees and staff in restaurants makes the US seem one of the politest places in the world. This strikes a chord with Martin who has written a book, Star-Spangled Manners, on the subject. Like Wilde, who remarked that the English are more interested in American barbarism than in American civilisation, she feels her countrymen are wronged on this score.

"The English think we're failed English people - that we don't quite get it right, but that's not the case," she says. "The founding fathers of America very deliberately felt that manners in European court society with strict demarcations were not for us. De Toqueville points out that the chief thing about the servant-master relationship in America is that both know that their positions could be reversed tomorrow."

Indeed, I tell Martin that when I was paying for newspapers at a hotel in New Mexico a few weeks earlier, the bellboy saw me looking for change and flipped me a quarter.

"The bellboy tipped you! I love it," she says, laughing out loud. Not for the first time that afternoon, I regret not having asked her to dinner. She would have been the life of the party.

'No Vulgar Hotel: The Desire and Pursuit of Venice' by Judith Martin (with Eric Denker) is published by WW Norton and out in paperback, available through the FT Bookshop at £7.99 (RRP £9.99) not including p&p, tel: 0870 429 5884; www.ft.com/bookshop

Rahul Jacob is the FT's travel, food and drink editor

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008