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“... more than a bit ramshackle, but totally without calcul and unsnobbish’. Isaiah Berlin and Nancy Mitford appear from time to time and are observed, but it is the background that is compelling as Bowen and her friends career around the countryside from house to house, a combination of dark roads, much alcohol and the absence of any driving test in ...”

“... people, he had found, are frightened of anger; he cultivated his natural ferocity.’ Nancy Mitford, although persuaded by her husband, Peter Rodd, to don a black shirt and gush in print on behalf of TPOF (The Poor Old Führer), was already marshalling the Union Jack Shirts for her novel Wigs on the Green. But it was not until 1938 that ...”

“... Nancy Mitford’s first novel, Highland Fling, is about a young British gentlewoman in the late 1920s, wriggling uneasily but divertingly in the generation gap of her time and class. Her parents’ generation seems to be stuck in the mud of the grouse moors: tough as old boots, the elders blaze away, pausing to reminisce about World War One and the filthy Hun ...”

“... had a temper, long hands, lovely shoulders, ‘cheekbones like a Russian’ and a cat called Nancy Mitford, who ‘fell two stone storeys’ from her bedroom window on Margaret’s 30th birthday; her bag held tranquillisers, cigarettes, sunglasses with a ‘pussycat slant’. Her first longed-for copy of Elle arrived from France the week after she ...”

“... hopelessly ill-prepared and soon invalided back to Britain with dysentery. There he met Jessica Mitford, a year older than himself, who had just finished her coming-out ‘season’. Mitford had not had the luxury of a school education, her parents – Lord and Lady Redesdale – not thinking it worth the trouble and ...”

“... Here it must be that arresting phrase, the right to play. Like Beaton, the Sitwells, Cole Porter, Nancy Cunard, Noël Coward, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Lady Diana Cooper and countless other hedonistic Jazz Age types, Murphy, de Acosta and Garland took the right to play for granted, as well they might. Puritanism was an anachronism and in some renovated ...”

“... asleep, while below Sotheby’s legend reads: ‘Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire: the last of the Mitford sisters’. The viewing was arranged to make people feel as much as possible as if they were at an aristocratic country house weekend, rather than in a glorified warehouse at a posh version of Flog It! With upper-class insouciance the diamond brooches ...”

“... his relationship with the woman who had ‘crippled’ him. This was his mother, the irrepressible Nancy Astor, a nightmare we would all want to be woken from. Too much money and too much mother; small wonder that Isaiah Berlin decided David Astor was ‘a neurotic, muddled, complicated, politically irresponsible, unhappy adventurer, permanently resentful of ...”

“... Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 book to characterise the world’s thinkers as hedgehogs or foxes; from Nancy Mitford two years later to distinguish between U and non-U. From across the Atlantic came David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd, which taught us to separate modern man into the two camps of the inner directed and the other-directed. This way of observing ...”

“... mentioning it again. He’d probably have been hoping it was going to be more along the lines of Nancy Mitford who, slightly to my surprise, he’d found very funny. Fifty years later Portnoy still makes me laugh and to anyone shy or (an unlikely thought) thinking themselves wicked for wanking the book is an emancipation, though without being in the ...”

“... the 1950s, her first novel was getting little notice until Esther Murphy sent it to her old friend Nancy Mitford, who sent it on to Evelyn Waugh. ‘Cool, witty, elegant,’ he wrote shortly afterwards in the Spectator. ‘It’s the one thing I hang onto sometimes,’ Bedford said many years later. ‘Much the best thing that ever happened to ...”

“... and was elected a fellow of All Souls. Thirty years later in December 1954, Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford: I went up to Oxford and visited my first homosexual love, Richard Pares, a don at All Souls. At 50 he is quite paralysed except his mind and voice, awaiting deterioration and death. A wife and four daughters, no private fortune. He would have ...”

“... A figure (often of fun) who keeps cropping up in memoirs of the Second War such as those of Nancy Mitford and James Lees-Milne is Stuart Preston, nicknamed the Sergeant, an American serviceman who came over to work at US HQ in London, later taking part in the invasion. He seems to have very rapidly become a feature of the upper-class English social ...”

“... Falconer, and the scrambled abolition of the office of lord chancellor. About the sport itself Nancy Mitford, no opponent of hunting, was both perceptive and unsentimental: The next day we all went out hunting. The Radletts loved animals, they loved foxes, they risked dreadful beating to unstop their earths, they read and cried over Reynard the ...”

“... shallow and profoundly lacking in judgment’, a toady to the rich and royal, and, according to Nancy Mitford, ‘vile and spiteful’. But there were always dissenting voices. ‘How sharp an eye,’ Malcolm Muggeridge wrote of the Diaries. ‘What neat malice! How, in their own fashion, well-written and truthful and honest they are!’ A.J.P. Taylor ...”