Word: mitfordly
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They were prototypes for Evelyn Waugh's "Bright Young People," the six sisters and a brother who provided a perfect historical metaphor for the fashionable confusions of their class and time. With apt symbolism, the Mitford girls paraded at smart London parties dressed as decadent Roman empresses. When the horses and hounds on their country estate bored them, the Mitfords traipsed abroad, treating Europe as their private playground. As the advancing shadow of World War II put a stop to the fun, they turned their patrician self-assurance to extremist politics. Nancy wrote the inside story in autobiographical novels, while...
...Power worship," many critics suggest, was the particular Mitford sin, and the Guinnesses partially agree. Diana, the beauty of the family, with passionate eyes set in a curiously passive face, showed "a potential for extremism." Translation: she fell in love with British Fascist Leader Sir Oswald Mosley and the ideas he believed...
More than two decades have passed since Jessica Mitford, in her 1963 exposé The American Way of Death, attacked the U.S. funeral industry as a "grotesque cloud-cuckoo-land where the trappings of Gracious Living are transformed, as in a nightmare, into the trappings of Gracious Dying." Mitford accused morticians of inflating funeral costs by foisting upon grieving customers such frills as high-fashion gravewear for the body and ornate caskets equipped with comfortable innerspring mattresses. Though the book stirred public indignation and helped lead to numerous investigations of the funeral business, it was not until last week that...
...think Charles might have had a little more glamour," Waugh's friend Nancy Mitford delicately complained to him when he sent her an advance copy of the book. Mitford saw the point of making the narrator "dim," but asked, "Would Julia and her brother and her sister all be in love with him if he was?" Irons asked himself the same question when he was assigned the role. "Is this character going to bore the audience terribly?" he wondered. "He certainly bores the pants...
...industrious." His letters to her, though, radiate warmth; he called her "my poppet" and "Whiskers" and confessed that their long separations during his service in World War II sometimes left him "near to tears." Similarly, he often abused his growing brood of six children to his friends. To Nancy Mitford: "All my children are here for the holidays-merry, affectionate, madly boring-except Harriet who has such an aversion to me that she screams when she catches sight of me a hundred yards away." But his letters to the youngsters tell the story of a doting papa. He comforted them...