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“... write, was turning into the ‘tough little person . . . always dressed as a motor racer’ whom Nancy Mitford later remarked. There had been only sporadic attempts to educate her, which had involved more train journeys, undertaken mostly alone, and the boat to England. This country, where she eventually made her home, felt at first like a mistake: ‘I ...”

“... of ‘fish-knives’, and so on. Those giveaway words were originally proscribed around 1956 by Nancy Mitford and John Betjeman, perhaps partly as a joke, but now served as infallible class markers: ‘It’s the way people like us don’t talk,’ Mum explains. There are things that must not be said or done, no reason offered or needed, and things ...”

“... acute problems of harmonisation. John Julius Norwich pointed out that St Paul can sound like Nancy Mitford (‘How shall not the ministration of the spirit be rather glorious?’), but dropped beside a Benetton hoarding on the Divis Road the Apostle might have been writing copy for a competitor to Jesus Jeans: ‘When anyone is in Christ he is a new ...”

“... of ‘misguided extremism in time of war’. ‘Misguided’ is a useful word on these occasions. Nancy Mitford was ‘buried ... beside her misguided sister, Unity’. For once, there is an absence of people who ‘did not suffer fools gladly’; perhaps one of them was Lord Inchcape, who ‘deeply resented any encroachment by the State into the life of ...”

“... tsar.’ One of those new-old dilemmas, affecting any modern nation with an ancien regime. Nancy Mitford was premature in saying: ‘An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off: it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.’ We shall see. The Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was overrun by the Red Army in ...”

“... over all funny, and it is plain that she is the kind of Englishwoman who, like the heroines of Nancy Mitford, only fully come to life Abroad. Her recipes are meticulous, authentic and reliable, and have formed the basic repertoire, not only of a thousand British late-20th-century dinner parties, but also of a goodly number of restaurants up and down ...”

“... of ordinary life and its motivations. ‘What shall I do?’ She-Evelyn asked her flat-mate Nancy Mitford when things began to come out. To Nancy, the problem was not serious: it was the sort of mischance at a party which could happen to anyone. ‘Tell Evelyn it wasn’t your fault,’ she said, ‘and that you ...”

“... it’s almost a hallowed tradition.) She behaved with wonderful surliness at occasions of duty. Nancy Mitford related one such fiasco: a dinner in honour of the Princess in Paris in 1959: Dinner was at 8.30 and at 8.30 Princess Margaret’s hairdresser arrived, so we waited for hours while he concocted a ghastly coiffure. She looked like a huge ball ...”

“... which is far more ironic than the Vogue flick-through reader can ever have guessed, includes a Nancy Mitford piece, ‘Why is a debutante?’ (1930), in the mood of Evelyn Waugh. And the Countess of Oxford and Asquith on ‘Changes I have seen’ (1935): she didn’t really see any, because anything of consequence happened inside her own front ...”

“... gives back what history has erased. In fact literature – Galsworthy, Woolf, Waugh, Wodehouse, Nancy Mitford, Compton-Burnett – has made this Victorian hybrid, the ‘ruling class’, so familiar that we forget how brief its existence was. A cross between a gentrified bourgeoisie and a professionalised aristocracy, it ranked as ‘upper-middle’ in ...”

“... ethically careful standing in the street 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 ...”

“... that springs from boredom and dissatisfaction with life. The only sin he mastered was lust. When Nancy Mitford up-braided him for his cruelty to some young man who tried only to express his admiration he replied: ‘You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.’ He asked ...”

“... I have no idea whether Duff Cooper has in fact been used by a novelist – possibly by his friend Nancy Mitford, whose novels I have never succeeded in reading – but certainly Somerset Maugham’s portrait of Hugh Walpole as Alroy Kear, in Cakes and Ale, is about as wide of the mark as it is possible to get. A novelist in any case has an axe to ...”

“... hats, the revenge of the milliners. When Christian Dior launched his New Look in postwar Paris, Nancy Mitford was suitably excited. ‘You pad your hips and squeeze your waist and skirts are to the ankle it is bliss ... and people shout ordures at you from vans because for some reason it creates class feeling in a way no sables could,’ she wrote. In ...”

“... among the chic apartments and smaller houses of Chelsea and Knightsbridge. ‘Aristocracy,’ Nancy Mitford noted over twenty years ago, ‘no longer keeps up any state in London,’ and their once-great Mayfair houses, with their splendid décor, lavish furnishings, spectacular works of art, and retinues of servants, have also vanished, or been ...”