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“... 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 ...”

“... The letters exchanged by Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh over twenty years were written, we are told, ‘to amuse, distract or tease’, a welcome function no doubt in times of bogged-down creativity. But it is clear they were also written to amuse, distract and tease posterity, since both correspondents were confident their dispatches would end up in the public domain, a consideration which did nothing to inhibit the flow of malice ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Richard Hoggart and Michael Young, while writing in a manner that falls somewhere between Nancy Mitford and a Daily Mail column. Her characters are fun, her observations acute, and since she does not try her hand at analysis, it is hard to fault her. Yet the question remains: is class in England more than an obsession? Is the world of Mrs ...”

“... in asking for a ‘drink’, instead of ‘something to drink’, which may well have stimulated Nancy Mitford to write her essay on Hare.) Sir Osbert Sitwell has testified to the mild panic which met Hare’s arrival at a garden party at Renishaw, when ‘the ladies held their hats to their heads and fled, fearing that he might include them in his next ...”

“... Church, deprived him of a settled base, and transferred to him the important friendship of Nancy Mitford, a close friend of his wife’s who had broken with her when she ran off. Partly through the Mitford family, and partly through the patronage of Lady Cunard (whom he detested), he was now able to launch ...”

“... a great deal of money, much of it Jewish, and a scandal that comes close to unseating the Kaiser. Nancy Mitford said it was one of the very best novels she had ever read and Evelyn Waugh ‘saluted a new artist’. Proustian in its preoccupation with money and rank, it has the charm of the dying Europe in which it is set: a world where the very ...”

“... The problem with Nancy Mitford, according to one of her sisters (the Communist? Possibly. The troublesome, giggly one who fancied Hitler? Not likely. The Duchess? Probably), is that she never came first with anyone. It’s doubtful if coming first is part of the human birth right, but it feels as if it is, both to those who do come first with someone, and those who don’t ...”

“... with the Longfords ‘John made everybody laugh.’ ‘Betch made me laugh,’ attests Pamela Mitford. ‘Throughout our lives, whenever we met, we always burst out laughing,’ corroborates John Summerson. Betjeman’s own feelings about his role as laugh-raiser were ambivalent. To the end of his life, and long after his jokes had ceased to serve any ...”

“... 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 than the fact ...”

“... ecclesiastics. During one of his most painful confrontations with the Inland Revenue, he wrote to Nancy Mitford: ‘It’s a sad prospect, isn’t it. I shall have to go to prison but that is hell nowadays with wireless and lectures and psychiatry. Oh for the Marshalsea.’ During one of his only interviews with a psychiatrist, Waugh observed that the ...”

“... Certain doomed spirits from the 16th century continue to haunt us and beguile us. On 21 May 1940 Nancy Mitford wrote to Evelyn Waugh on the subject:I used to masturbate whenever I thought about Lady Jane Grey so of course I thought about her constantly and even executed a fine watercolour of her on the scaffold, which my mother still has, framed, and in which Lady Jane and her ladies-in-waiting all wear watches hanging from enamel bows, as my mother did at the time … I still get quite excited when I think of Lady Jane (less and less often as the years roll on ...”

“... life-long exile’. It is a novel, you might say, bred out of Ford Madox Ford, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, and is by no means without interest. It does not help, though, to say, as Michael Holroyd seems to, that in it autobiography has been imaginatively transmuted into fiction – for that is true of almost any novel. Its originality lies just in ...”

“... the aspic of nostalgia just because they are so laughable – the viewpoint of Wodehouse, Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Peter Simple. The term ‘novelty’, which now gets translated as ‘trendy’ or ‘fashionable’, becomes a dirty word. ‘Feeling profound or vehement’ is reserved for those who wish to change society – for Tony Benn, the ‘Race ...”