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“... 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 very notion of the public quite ludicrous. (How she would struggle today!) Her idea of perfect bliss, she once said, was lots of peasants happy in their cottages as ...”

“... parties at Cliveden represented any kind of pro-German conspiracy. And in her defence, she was no Diana Mosley. Waldorf may have been one of the first in Britain to meet with Hitler face to face, but it was not from any love of National Socialism. Waldorf wrote to the Times to defend the Cliveden house parties and to insist that he and ‘Lady ...”

“... existing regime. Duff Cooper, Liddell says, was ‘feeling rather bad’ because his wife, Lady Diana, was facing prosecution for accepting a free sack of stale bread for her pigs. More enlightening was the remark made to him by Churchill in May 1940 when France fell, and passed on to Liddell: ‘The end,’ Churchill is supposed to have said, ‘is very ...”

“... Court, where he corresponds with wealthy, witty ladies (Mitford takes turns with Ann Fleming and Diana Cooper) who keep him au fait with the doings of vile bodies in the world from which he has withdrawn. The postal service is so good that a letter from Mitford in postwar Paris telling of the latest liaison dangereuse can be on his desk the next day. She is ...”

“... But then what else can we expect if they will marry a Duke of Devonshire (Deborah), Sir Oswald Mosley (Diana), the Communist nephew of Winston Churchill (Jessica), the inspiration of Waugh’s Basil Seal (Nancy) – not to mention a Platonic crush on the Worst Man in the World, Adolf Hitler (Unity). I have left out ...”

“... for ever. Many of his women friends are named after counties or important metropolitan districts: Diana Westmoreland, Sally Westminster, Caroline Somerset, Deborah Devonshire. Numerous acquaintances identified in the text by their quite ordinary first names turn out, in the footnotes, to be dukes or earls. Some, by a process of dynastic ...”

“... his ‘asinine high-pitched Bloomsbury voice’. One after another the nobs are scarified: Lady Diana Cooper, around whom ‘men of all ages flocked ... like gulls round a council tip,’ and who herself had ‘a talent for scavenging that would have done credit to a coyote’, Lady Mosley, Daphne Rae, Beatrice ...”

“... unhappy marriage. In any event, Winston, unlike many of his contemporaries – Duff Cooper, Oswald Mosley – seems not to have strayed. Nor did he pursue anything similar to the ambiguous amitié amoureuse of Herbert Asquith and Venetia Stanley. Clementine, however, in 1935, while on a Pacific cruise, had a platonic affair with Terence Philip, a worldly and ...”

“... But she shared most of Romilly’s enthusiasms and hatreds. In particular, unlike her sisters Diana and Unity, who were busy falling in love with both Fascism and Fascists (Oswald Mosley and Adolf Hitler respectively), Decca, as she was always called, was a would-be Communist, who scratched the hammer and sickle onto ...”

“... Rothermere, the greatest ass of them all, put the Harmsworth Press at the disposal of Oswald Mosley. ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ cried the Daily Mail. Koss writes: ‘It was one thing for the press to assert its political independence, which no one could seriously dispute, but quite another for it to act responsibly upon its claims. In the years ...”

“... 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 pagan sense tiresome and offensive too. In Cohen’s view, no ...”