Word: mitfords
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...FINE OLD CONFLICT by Jessica Mitford; Knopf; 333 pages...
...Mitford sisters did not exist, Evelyn Waugh would have had to invent them. Their splendid improbability makes his ongoing saga of the decline and fall of the English upper class read like an understatement. Take for instance Nancy Mitford, one of the Mad Young Things of the '20s and a bitter-comic novelist in her own right, who ended up in self-imposed exile in Paris, musing about Louis XIV. Or consider the two fascist Mitfords: Diana, who married Sir Oswald Mosley, Führer of the British Blackshirts, and Unity, a prized exotic of Hitler's inner...
After them among the daughters of utterly respectable Lord and Lady Redesdale came Jessica Mitford, known to her family as Decca, who scratched hammers and sickles on the windowpanes of her stately home with her diamond ring before running off to the Spanish Civil War at the age of 19 with a nephew of Sir Winston Churchill's. In A Fine Old Conflict, a sequel to her earlier memoir, Daughters and Rebels, Decca promises to explain why she in particular and Mitford sisters in general have behaved so-well, Mitfordly...
...died in action in 1941. Despite that tragedy, Decca tells, with a nice sense of wartime humor, of her duty on the Washington front in the Office of Price Administration. At last it is the moment for the slap in the face of the British Empire-the really big Mitford-sister gesture. After moving to California, marrying a brilliant radical lawyer. Bob Treuhaft, and becoming a naturalized citizen, Decca Mitford joined the Communist Party. What more could a daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale...
Lady Cynthia died in 1933. Three years later Mosley secretly married Diana Freeman-Mitford in Berlin. The wedding luncheon was given by Mrs. Joseph Goebbels, and the honored guests included Adolf Hitler, who saw Diana as "the ideal Nordic woman." At the time, Hitler was a close friend of Diana's sister, Unity Mitford, whose active infatuation with Nazism ended in a botched suicide attempt at the outbreak of World War II. Even though Mosley had pledged to fight against Germany if England was attacked, Churchill prudently had him and his wife interned for 3½ years as possible...