Word: mitfords
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...follows perverse characters, this family history sparkles on the surface. But The House of Mitford refuses to probe the darkness, and by treating its subjects with too much charity, reduces their lives and careers to a series of gossipy, entertaining, but ultimately trivial pursuits. Perhaps, given their predilections, this is the book they deserve...
Radio Humorist Garrison Keillor's first novel gives fans something more lasting than air. The seven siblings of The House of Mitford...
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...