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“... to refer to a line manager, who presumably has received advanced training in the subject from Nancy Mitford. The British passport itself is still a swaggering thing, with a power of Open Sesame that places it first in the world (shared with Germany) for visa-free travel – currently to 173 countries and territories. The Eritrean passport, by ...”

“... class confidence allied to a tiny, repetitive tic of fanaticism. It’s easy to see how Diana Mitford/Guinness/Mosley attracted the obvious clichés about ‘The Huntress’ and ‘The Nymph’. Anyone with her first name, and a pleasing profile to boot, can earn such leaden gallantries, as Earl Spencer, that other upper-class thug, not long ago ...”

“... Arthur Koestler; and two of them married Derek Jackson, who had previously been married to Pamela Mitford and would eventually tot up six marriages.Before I go on, I want to mention a paradox that I’d like someone to explain to me. On the one hand, divorce in the mid-20th century was still utterly taboo: some boarding schools wouldn’t even take pupils ...”

“... going altogether. So it was lucky that this time her eye happened to fall on a reissued volume of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. She picked it up. ‘Now. Didn’t her sister marry the Mosley man?’ Mr Hutchings said he believed she did. ‘And the mother-in-law of another sister was my mistress of the robes?’ ‘I don’t know about ...”

“... pardon me’. But it is the same man. The hero of ‘There is no conversation’ is Mitford Man, seen plain. The irresistible Frenchman of Nancy Mitford’s fantasy – Fabrice, Charles Edouard – who knows how women’s lipstick should be applied, how long to a millimetre their skirts should fashionably ...”

“... fell in love with Cimmie at the end of the following year, when they were both in Plymouth helping Nancy Astor in her campaign to become the first woman MP. There is no reason beyond the obvious ones – she was good-looking, Curzon’s daughter and had an unusual interest in politics – why he should have taken to her. On the other hand, Mosley, with his ...”

“... worlds – Sarmatia Felix, the land of Golden Freedom. Bewildered readers may remember the way the Mitford sisters described their ‘Farve’, Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s books. Here was a real English Sarmatian: a ferocious backwoods peer who boasted that he had only read one book in his life, who sometimes ...”

“... a grand Irish family she was quite snobbish and talking of someone she said: ‘Then he married a Mitford … but that’s a stage everybody goes through.’ Even the most ordinary remark would be given her own particular twist, and she could be quite camp. Conversation had once turned, as conversation will, to forklift trucks. Feeling that industrial ...”