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“... but he was 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 ...”

“... give their eye-teeth for nothing more hostile to contend with than bad reviews. In 1963, when Jessica Mitford’s American Way of Death was published, America was in the middle of a full-scale critique of its mores and institutions. This was the golden age of the exposé. Vance Packard’s Status Seekers, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and ...”

“... like a frowning man with a tin cup. This is most true of Nancy’s novels and Hons and Rebels, Jessica’s famous memoir, but it’s true of the letters too, which now appear in The Mitfords, a collection edited by Charlotte Mosley. The man in the street was never Nancy Mitford’s sort of thing. In fact, she found the ...”

“... cuts Peter Sellers. But are the rest of us any better? Perhaps the spate of books about, say, the Mitford family is also a symptom of an urge to become vicarious groupies, hobnobbers by proxy among the upper classes. You too can whistle the Music of Time. Is it because the Mitford daughters are so exceptional, or so ...”

“... to the English-speaking public The Memoirs and Recollections: 1866-1906 of Algernon Bertram Mitford, the 1st Lord Redesdale. As in the case of Lady Fraser’s mammoth work, I would hardly have dared attempt lectures and correspondence which Jessica Mitford dismissed as ‘Grandfather’s depressingly huge ...”

“... launched into the world, the London Season and the marriage market. It was, as Jessica Mitford wrote two years later, ‘the specific, upper-class version of the puberty rite’. Or rather it had been, for 1958 saw the last such presentations; this was the year of the last curtsey. That it was all coming to an end was less surprising ...”

“... prisons and reformatories remain, in their terrifying way, beyond the grasp of almost all, from Jessica Mitford to Norman Mailer. That Kevles should be thought – as some have thought him – incapable of giving the background to this story, simply for having been serialised in the New Yorker is wilfully unimaginative. The mid-sections of In the Name ...”

“... a lovable talent for organising others, etc, etc.’ Such an unworthy thought never crossed Decca Mitford’s mind. She, too, is always one for a joke. I like jokes, there can’t be too many of them for me, so I enjoyed her book, which is written with irrepressible Mitford brio. There’s a high-spirited acknowledgment of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wars, the bombed graveyards of Britain and Europe, the nuclear stand-off of the long Cold War, Jessica Mitford and the removal of the ban by the Catholic Church in 1963 all contributed to the chronology detailed in Committed to the Cleansing Flame. In 1967, the number of cremations exceeded the number of burials in the UK, and now more than 70 per ...”

“... what he called ‘the reality of death’. I think he’d heard that at one of these conferences. Jessica Mitford had just sold a million copies of The American Way of Death and Evelyn Waugh had already weighed in with The Loved One and talk had turned at cocktail parties to ‘barbaric rituals’ and ‘morbid curiosities’. The mortuary associations ...”

“... Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, a memoir of family life under Mussolini, and Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford, some of whose family yearned to live under British fascism. There are similar scenes of people who appear capable of little more than safeguarding their eccentricities amid ideological storms. Ypi’s grandmother grew up in Salonica, met her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Dictionary to ‘members of the dictionary’s “usage panel”, (including Alistair Cooke, Jessica Mitford, Margaret Atwood, Paul Theroux, Fay Weldon, Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Dwight Bolinger, Elizabeth Traugott and many more). What is revealing is how the panel’s response to certain types of usage ...”

“... My great new friend is Noël Coward’, Nancy Mitford confided to a correspondent in 1949. ‘Bliss. He shakes like a jelly at one’s jokes, I adore that.’ It was laughs Nancy Mitford wanted, much more than grandeur. She longs to make people laugh, and sometimes, almost in the manner of a nervous stand-up comedienne, interrupts her letters to make sure that the audience is suitably convulsed ...”