Not many lives literally span over a century, but Dame Ninette de Valois, O.M., C.H., a woman everyone called "Madame" and the founder of Britain's Royal Ballet, was born in the nineteenth century and died in the twenty-first. And that was surely the least remarkable thing about her. She was spiritually and professionally a child of Serge Diaghilev, but also a child of W.B. Yeats, and she was effectively a Margaret Thatcher before anyone had ever heard of Margaret Thatcher. De Valois ...