Ariella Budick writes in Newsday:

Brooke Astor, who died at 105 Monday of pneumonia at Holly Hill, her Westchester County estate, was perhaps New York City’s last grande dame, an all-but-extinct breed. Socialite, philanthropist, self-confessed flirt and expert charmer, she enriched the city she lived in with wit, style, and unstinting largesse.
…
She was the only child of Gen. John Henry Russell Jr., a Marine Corps officer whose work took him around the globe. Brooke passed her childhood in a range of foreign locales: China, the Dominican Republic, Panama and Hawaii. She briefly attended the Madeira School in McLean, Va., before dropping out to pursue her social life full-time. “My mother was afraid I would learn too much and become a bluestocking,” she told her friend, the late New Yorker writer Brendan Gill. Cont’d.

In a 1999 Talk, John Cassidy described an awards-gala appearance in which Astor, “a sprightly flyweight going on ninety-seven,” appeared alongside Hillary Clinton:

In truth, though, Mrs. Clinton was no match for Mrs. Astor, a hardy dowager who has honed her technique at thousands of such occasions. Clambering onto the stage, she held the audience rapt as she told of her thirty-nine years as head of the Astor Foundation—a period during which the foundation distributed two hundred million dollars to causes that ranged from the public-library system and the Metropolitan Museum to low-income housing in Queens. “I’ve given it all to New York, and I’ve never given anything to anything I haven’t seen,” she declared, in her plummy English accent, the likes of which is rarely heard outside Buckingham Palace these days.

Gill wrote in his 1997 piece: “She always speaks at ease, without preparation, phrases springing to her lips with the unguardedness of someone who has long known exactly who she is.”