Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford The Biography

Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford The Biography
Author: Laura Thompson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 543
Release: 2015-01-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1784082635

'The book is a gem: fresh, intelligent and assured' Sunday Times Nancy Mitford was, in the words of her sister Lady Diana Mosley, 'very, very complex'. Her biographies and novels, her journalism, and the vast body of letters to her family, friends such as Evelyn Waugh, and to the great love of her life, Gaston Palewski, all tell an intriguing story. Drawing from these, as well as conversations with Mitford's two surviving sisters and colleagues, prize-winning author Laura Thompson has fashioned a portrait of a contradictory and courageous woman. Thompson approaches her subject with wit, perspicacity and affection, while eschewing clichés about the eccentricities of the Mitford clan. Life in a Cold Climate is full of the sound of Mitfordian laughter; but tells also the often paradoxical and complex story beneath the smiling and ever elegant façade. 'A brilliant study, original, perceptive, passionate' Selina Hastings 'Well-nigh perfect' Diana Mosley, Literary Review

Take Six Girls

Take Six Girls
Author: Laura Thompson
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-08-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781784970895

The eldest was a razor-sharp novelist of upper-class manners; the second was loved by John Betjeman; the third was a fascist who married Oswald Mosley; the fourth idolized Hitler and shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany; the fifth was a member of the American Communist Party; the sixth became Duchess of Devonshire. They were the Mitford sisters: Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah. Born into country-house privilege in the early years of the 20th century, they became prominent as 'bright young things' in the high society of interwar London. Then, as the shadows crept over 1930s Europe, the stark – and very public – differences in their outlooks came to symbolize the political polarities of a dangerous decade. The intertwined stories of their stylish and scandalous lives – recounted in masterly fashion by Laura Thompson – hold up a revelatory mirror to upper-class English life before and after WWII.

Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford
Author: Selina Hastings
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2012-07-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307949478

Nancy Mitford’s life was as glamorous and as dramatic as her most famous novels, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. Mitford was witty, intelligent, often acerbic, a great tease, and an acute observer of upper-class English idiosyncrasies. With the publication of her comic novels, based in part on her eccentric family, she became a huge bestseller and household name. An inspired letter writer, she wrote almost daily to a wide variety of correspondents, among them Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, John Betjeman, and, of course, her famous sisters. Noted biographer Selina Hastings captures the gaiety and frivolity as well as the unhappy truth of Nancy Mitford’s life: her failed marriage and her long, unfulfilled relationship with her dashing but unfaithful French lover contrasting sharply with literary celebrity and glittering social success. Hastings has written a biography that is as superbly entertaining and clear-eyed as the unforgettable novels that are its subject’s lasting claim to fame.

Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford
Author: Harold Mario Mitchell Acton
Publisher:
Total Pages: 224
Release: 1975
Genre: Novelists, English
ISBN: 9781903933015

The only biography in print of Nancy Mitford, written by her friend Harold Acton shortly after her death. Defining an exceptionally witty era whose vanishing continues to fascinate, Nancy Mitford's writings have remained steadfast in their popularity - like those of Evelyn Waugh, her male counterpart. The repackaging of Mitford's novels Love in A Cold Climate, The Pursuit of Love, Don't Tell Alfred (Penguin 2000/1) and a recent television series on the Mitfords have done much to feed the interest in her life. Harold Acton's book is driven by his intimate knowledge of her. Both belonging to a blissfully carefree generation, he shows her as she thought of herself and was seen by those closest to her. Formidable, loyal, amusing and determined, her life was tragic only in that she knew exactly how to handle her fate with a supreme wit reminiscent of Bridget Jones' diaries.

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie
Author: Laura Thompson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2018-03-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1681777118

It has been one hundred years since Agatha Christie wrote her first novel and created the formidable Hercule Poirot. A brilliant and award winning biographer, Laura Thompson now turns her sharp eye to Agatha Christie. Arguably the greatest crime writer in the world, Christie's books still sell over four million copies each year—more than thirty years after her death—and it shows no signs of slowing.But who was the woman behind these mystifying, yet eternally pleasing, puzzlers? Thompson reveals the Edwardian world in which Christie grew up, explores her relationships, including those with her two husbands and daughter, and investigates the many mysteries still surrounding Christie's life, most notably, her eleven-day disappearance in 1926.Agatha Christie is as mysterious as the stories she penned, and writing about her is a detection job in itself. With unprecedented access to all of Christie's letters, papers, and notebooks, as well as fresh and insightful interviews with her grandson, daughter, son-in-law and their living relations, Thompson is able to unravel not only the detailed workings of Christie's detective fiction, but the truth behind this mysterious woman.

Love in a Cold Climate

Love in a Cold Climate
Author: Nancy Mitford
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2010-03-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 014196474X

Love in a Cold Climate is the sequel to Nancy Mitford's bestselling novel The Pursuit of Love. 'How lovely - green velvet and silver. I call that a dream, so soft and delicious, too.' She rubbed a fold of the skirt against her cheek. 'Mine's silver lame, it smells like a bird cage when it gets hot but I do love it. Aren't you thankful evening skirts are long again?' Ah, the dresses! But oh, the monotony of the Season, with its endless run of glittering balls. Even fabulously fashionable Polly Hampton - with her startling good looks and excellent social connections - is beginning to wilt under the glare. Groomed for the perfect marriage by her mother, fearsome Lady Montdore, Polly instead scandalises society by declaring her love for her uncle 'Boy' Dougdale, the Lecherous Lecturer, and promptly eloping to France. But the consequences of this union no one could quite expect . . . Love in a Cold Climate is the wickedly funny follow-up to The Pursuit of Love. 'Entirely original, inimitable and irresistible' Philip Hensher, Spectator Nancy Mitford was the eldest of the infamous Mitford sisters, known for her membership in 'The Bright Young Things' clique of the 1920s and an intimate of Evelyn Waugh; she produced witty, satirical novels with a cast of characters taken directly from the aristocratic social scene of which she was a part. Her novels, Wigs on the Green, The Pursuit of Love, The Blessing and Don't Tell Alfred, are available in single paperback editions from Penguin or as part of The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford which also includes Highland Fling, Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie. This edition of Love in a Cold Climate is introduced by actor, director and writer Alan Cumming.

Don't Tell Alfred

Don't Tell Alfred
Author: Nancy Mitford
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2010-08-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307741397

In this delightful comedy, Fanny—the quietly observant narrator of Nancy Mitford’s two most famous novels—finally takes center stage. Fanny Wincham—last seen as a young woman in The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate—has lived contentedly for years as housewife to an absent-minded Oxford don, Alfred. But her life changes overnight when her beloved Alfred is appointed English Ambassador to Paris. Soon she finds herself mixing with royalty and Rothschilds while battling her hysterical predecessor, Lady Leone, who refuses to leave the premises. When Fanny’s tender-hearted secretary begins filling the embassy with rescued animals and her teenage sons run away from Eton and show up with a rock star in tow, things get entirely out of hand. Gleefully sending up the antics of mid-century high society, Don’t Tell Alfred is classic Mitford.

Heiresses

Heiresses
Author: Laura Thompson
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1250202744

New York Times bestselling author Laura Thompson returns with Heiresses, a fascinating look at the lives of heiresses throughout history and the often tragic truth beneath the gilded surface. Heiresses: surely they are among the luckiest women on earth. Are they not to be envied, with their private jets and Chanel wardrobes and endless funds? Yet all too often those gilded lives have been beset with trauma and despair. Before the 20th century a wife’s inheritance was the property of her husband, making her vulnerable to kidnap, forced marriages, even confinement in an asylum. And in modern times, heiresses fell victim to fortune-hunters who squandered their millions. Heiresses tells the stories of these million dollar babies: Mary Davies, who inherited London’s most valuable real estate, and was bartered from the age of twelve; Consuelo Vanderbilt, the original American “Dollar Heiress”, forced into a loveless marriage; Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress who married seven times and died almost penniless; and Patty Hearst, heiress to a newspaper fortune who was arrested for terrorism. However, there are also stories of independence and achievement: Angela Burdett-Coutts, who became one of the greatest philanthropists of Victorian England; Nancy Cunard, who lived off her mother's fortune and became a pioneer of the civil rights movement; and Daisy Fellowes, elegant linchpin of interwar high society and noted fashion editor. Heiresses is about the lives of the rich, who—as F. Scott Fitzgerald said—are ‘different’. But it is also a bigger story about how all women fought their way to equality, and sometimes even found autonomy and fulfillment.