Vol. 24 No. 1 · 3 January 2002
pages 25-26 | 2938 words
Nit, Sick and Bore
India Knight
- The Mitford Girls: The Biography of an Extraordinary Family by Mary Lovell
Little, Brown, 611 pp, £20.00, September 2001, ISBN 0 316 85868 4
- Nancy Mitford: A Memoir by Harold Acton
Gibson Square, 256 pp, £16.99, September 2001, ISBN 1 903933 01 3
Either you love the jokes or you don’t, with the Mitfords. The biting, ferocious ‘teases’, the flippancy, the apparent inability to take anything particularly seriously, are everything, not least because they encapsulate all that used to be good about Englishness, and all that is grotesque also. The jokes, always cruel, both charm and repel; without them, you’re left with girls in pearls living borderline tragic lives, or with the po-faced, lumpen Unity Mitford – galumph, galumph – who, unlike her five sisters (in descending order: Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Decca, Debo; there was also a brother, Tom), had little talent for levity. So the jokes are crucial. One occasionally gets the impression, from Mary Lovell’s compelling, fluent and problematically sucker-uppy biography, that she isn’t always entirely sure whether the jokes are funny or not: she quotes the tried-and-tested ones over and over and leaves out the new ones thrown up by Nancy Mitford’s enormous, enormously funny correspondence, or by Jan Dalley’s recent biography of Diana Mosley. You rather imagine her, nose pressed up against the glass, longing to roar along with the Duchess of Devonshire (whom, she informs us, she once met at dinner), but not quite knowing how.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 24 No. 3 · 7 February 2002
From I. Brooker
The Mitford girls have always been presented as larger than life. India Knight (LRB, 3 January) claims that they had 16 great-grandparents, so their tetraploidy would explain this.
I. Brooker
Canberra
From Stuart Hood
Is Janos von Almasy who is mentioned in India Knight's review of The Mitford Girls the same man who was on Rommel's staff – the officer who figures in Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient and the film based on it? As an intelligence officer in Cairo in 1941 I had him on my card index of German officers in the Afrika Korps and tracked down in Cairo University library his book on the Western Desert (which he had explored prewar). In it he quotes Herodotus as saying that large quantities of Greek vases were imported annually to Egypt, where they disappeared. They were, he was convinced, used to store water on the desert routes. On the basis of this material I wrote a paper suggesting that Almasy was setting up supply dumps in the desert. These, I believe, were discovered being used by him to help infiltrate agents into the Nile Valley.
Stuart Hood
Brighton
Vol. 24 No. 6 · 21 March 2002
From J.R. Evenhuis
Stuart Hood is wrong in his speculation that János Almásy (there is no 'von') is the officer who figured in The English Patient (Letters, 7 February). He has mistaken János for his much more famous brother Ladislaus, who indeed gave the British some trouble in the Middle East, succeeding as he did in transporting two German spies well to the south of the North African front through the Sahara to Assiut in Egypt. There they took the train to Cairo, but were found out very soon afterwards. Ladislaus Almásy (1895-1951) had already made a name for himself in geographical circles as the discoverer of an oasis (Zarzura) in the Sahara with remarkable specimens of primitive art. Hood makes another mistake: Almásy's Zarzura lies in the Libyan Desert, not in the Western.
J.R. Evenhuis
Scheveningen
