I remember too another Russian diplomat finishing his drink and then, to my mother’s astonishment, crunching up his glass and swallowing it.

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 80.   His father is the Ambassador to France at the end of the war.  

Nevertheless, my memories of those evening parties are many and varied. There was Colette, barefoot and with her great fuzzy halo of hair, being carried bodily in by a large elderly gentleman and holding court from a sofa; there were those two arch villains Molotov and Vyshinsky—for the Paris Foreign Ministers Conference began in 1945—together with the Soviet Ambassador Mr. Bogomolov, whom my mother asked if he could arrange for me to go and stay with a family in Moscow or Leningrad for a few months to improve my Russian. He replied tonelessly: “Chez nous ce n’est pas la coutume.”* I remember too another Russian diplomat finishing his drink and then, to my mother’s astonishment, crunching up his glass and swallowing it. This elicited a furious diatribe from his wife, to which he made a spirited reply. When my mother asked him what she had said he confessed that she had reproached him for his bad manners; he had defended himself on the grounds that she frequently did it herself, to which she had merely said that was beside the point—she didn’t like him doing it. Then there was Isaiah Berlin, later to be my Oxford tutor, not only the most brilliant but also the funniest man I had ever met, refusing a very small drink on the grounds that it would induce “complete stupefaction.” Best of all I remember an evening when Christian Bérard—always known as Bébé—painter, designer, and book illustrator, gloriously unkempt, with hair to his shoulders and a bushy brown beard full of cigarette ash (twenty years later it would hardly have been noticed, but the style was rare indeed in the 1940s), turned up with his pet pug under his arm. Soon after his arrival he put it on the floor, where it instantly deposited a formidable turd. Bébé, horrified, unhesitatingly—and to the immense admiration, it must be said, of all around him—picked it up and put it in his pocket. My mother always said that it was the best example of good manners she had ever seen.

*“With us it is not the custom.”