The writers Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh were great friends, and their friendship gave rise to the 500 letters full of malicious jokes and social gossip, presented in this collection.

Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, two of the twentieth century's most amusing and gifted writers, matched wits and exchanged insults in more than five hundred letters, a continuous irreverent dialogue that stretched for twenty-two years. Their delicious correspondence, much of it never published before (for fear of speaking ill of the living), provides colorful glimpses of both lives, testifies to their enduring but thorny friendship, and evokes the literary and social circles of London and Paris at midcentury. In their letters they sharpened their wits at the expense of friends and enemies alike, but with particular relish they dissected their friends, who included Harold Acton, Graham Greene, the Sitwells, Duff and Diana Cooper, Randolph Churchill, and their favorite butt, Cyril Connolly. Waugh's pessimistic brand of Roman Catholicism clashed with Mitford's cheerful iconoclasms; her francophilia only fueled her friend's dislike of all things French. He accused her of bad grammar and worse theology; she nailed him with snobbery and anti-Semitism.

The writers Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh were great friends, and their friendship gave rise to the 500 letters in this collection.

Nancy Mitford died in 1973 before she could write an autobiography. But she was one of the great letter writers of this century, and her sparkling correspondence to her famous family and to a wide circle of brilliant friends - Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, Robert Byron, Cyril Connolly, and Raymond Mortimer, among many others - sheds an extraordinary light on their lives and the times in which they lived. Novelist, biographer, and journalist, Nancy was born in 1904 into a family that seemed always to he in Britain's headlines - and not only on the society pages. The eldest of Lord and Lady Redesdale's seven talented children (writer Jessica Mitford among them), Nancy immortalized their family life in her first bestseller, The Pursuit of Love. Her natural wit, fed by the frivolous 1920s, was undimmed by her political coming of age in the 1930s, or the courage and stoicism of wartime London. At war's end she moved to Paris, and her home there became "a congenial rendezvous of French and English letters", in the words of her friend Harold Acton. From this perch, Nancy wrote her daily correspondence, delighting in her adopted country and skewering pretension wherever she found it. Wildly funny and filled with outrageous gossip, Mitford's letters detail not only the foolishness and foibles of London and Parisian society, but also the more tragic story of an unhappy marriage and her often anguished affair with "the Colonel", a leading member of de Gaulle's government. Love from Nancy is the first published collection of Nancy's correspondence. It draws on eight thousand letters spanning six decades, many dashed off with hardly a crossed-out word, all so full of verve that the writer seems to beat one's elbow. It includes an important selection of letters to Evelyn Waugh, her close friend and literary mentor. Whether asking Waugh what Roman Catholics believe awaits them in heaven or soliciting Field Marshal Montgomery's opinion of the latest Paris fashions, these letters give us Nancy Mitford at her provocative and teasing best.

The Mitford sisters were the great wits and beauties of their time. Immoderate in their passions for ideas and people, they counted among their diverse friends Adolf Hitler and Queen Elizabeth II, Cecil Beaton and President Kennedy, Evelyn Waugh and Givenchy. The Mitfords offers an unparalleled look at these privileged siblings through their own unabashed correspondence. Spanning the twentieth century, the magically vivid letters of the legendary Mitfords constitute a superb social and historical chronicle and an intimate portrait of the stormy but enduring relationships between six beautiful, gifted, and radically different women.

Nancy Mitford’s most controversial novel, unavailable for decades, is a hilarious satirical send-up of the fascist political enthusiasms of her sisters Unity and Diana, and of her notorious brother-in-law, Sir Oswald Mosley. Written in 1934, early in Hitler’s rise, Wigs on the Green lightheartedly skewers the devoted followers of British fascism. The sheltered and unworldy Eugenia Malmain is one of the richest girls in England and an ardent supporter of General Jack and his Union Jackshirts. World-weary Noel Foster and his scheming friend Jasper Aspect are in search of wealthy heiresses to marry; Lady Marjorie, disguised as a commoner, is on the run from the Duke she has just jilted at the altar; and her friend Poppy is considering whether to divorce her rich husband. When these characters converge with the colorful locals at a grandly misconceived costume pageant that turns into a brawl between Pacifists and Jackshirts, madcap farce ensues. Long suppressed by the author out of sensitivity to family feelings, Wigs on the Green can now be enjoyed by fans of Mitford’s superbly comic novels.

The diaries of one of our finest novelists - a unique literary document, reissued in Phoenix paperback.

Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh were two of the twentieth century's most amusing and gifted writers, who matched wits and traded literary advice in more than five hundred letters over twenty-two years. Dissecting their friends, criticizing each other's books and concealing their true feelings beneath a barrage of hilarious and knowing repartee, they found it far easier to conduct a friendship on paper than in person. This correspondence provides a colourful glimpse into the literary and social circles of London and Paris, during the Second World War and for twenty years after.

Collected mid-twentieth–century correspondence between the author of The Pursuit of Love and her former employer, the celebrated London bookseller. Nancy Mitford was a brilliant personality, a remarkable novelist and a legendary letter writer. It is not widely known that she was also a bookseller. From 1942 to 1946 she worked in Heywood Hill’s famous shop in Curzon Street, and effectively ran it when the male staff were called up for war service. After the war she left to live in France, but she maintained an abiding interest in the shop, its stock, and the many and varied customers who themselves form a cavalcade of the literary stars of post-war Britain. Her letters to Heywood Hill advise on recent French titles that might appeal to him and his customers, gossip engagingly about life in Paris, and enquire anxiously about the reception of her own books, while seeking advice about new titles to read. In return Heywood kept her up to date with customers and their foibles, and with aspects of literary and bookish life in London. Charming, witty, utterly irresistible, the correspondence gives brilliant insights into a world that has almost disappeared. Praise for The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street “This volume of letters between [Nancy Mitford], then living in Paris, and G. Heywood Hill (1907–1986) is like a glass of champagne, from a good year, at a quiet garden party. It’s a beautiful day, one is among friends—but not too many—and laughter reigns.” —The New Criterion

"A work of art as rich and subtle and unnerving as anything its author has ever done" (New Yorker), The Loved One is Evelyn Waugh's cutting satire of 1940s California and the Anglo-American cultural divide. Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets' mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday--and Dennis gets drawn into a bizarre love triangle with Aimée Thanatogenos, a naïve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr. Joyboy, a master of the embalmer's art. Waugh's dark and savage satire depicts a world where reputation, love, and death cost a very great deal.