Nancy Mitford
The summer I dwelt in marble halls
Gill Johnson recalls the glorious months she once spent in the ‘gilded labyrinth’ of a Venetian palazzo, employed as an English tutor to an aristocratic Italian family
Mitfordian mischief: Darling, by India Knight, reviewed
It takes chutzpah to tackle a national treasure as jealously loved and gatekept as Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.…
The hypocrisy of actors
I’ve been keeping a journal for nearly 60 years. There are piles of the damn things in archives and covered…
Honest, faithful and fantastically enjoyable: BBC1's The Pursuit of Love reviewed
I’d been expecting the BBC to make a dreadful hash of The Pursuit of Love, especially when I read that…
The smelly, snobbish death of the English public toilet
I blame Nancy Mitford: she made the English so frightened of saying ‘toilet’ that now they have hardly any left…
The Mad Boy, Peter Watson, Cecil Beaton and the limo — by Sofka Zinovieff
It would not have surprised their friends in the 1930s when Peter Watson had a fling with my grandfather, Robert…
Alexander Chancellor: what’s wrong with the word ‘toilet’?
I am embarrassed not by people using ‘non-U’ expressions but by people who still care about such things
