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As Orlando, Duke of Oxford and the spy agency’s founder, Fiennes might read more cuddly than studly, but he lends a surprising gravitas to this flibbertigibbet feature.

“My sister’s been painted as some flibbertigibbet socialite floating from party to party and leading a gilded life,” he said.

Invariably described as a Renaissance man, Mr. Miller preferred terms like “flibbertigibbet,” once telling People magazine, “Things are always best when there has been a careless abandon about them.”

That left Jonathan with lifelong feelings of guilt, which led him on several occasions to announce that he was abandoning what he once called “this footling flibbertigibbet world of theater.”

Magnet ends his book with a gratuitous, even racist assault on Barack Obama, in which the former president’s mother is trashed as a “Kumbaya mother” and a “flibbertigibbet white mother.”