2000s

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

StuckinaBook All , 13 Comments

If that title doesn’t make you want to find out more, then your natural curiosity is sadly deficient. Elaine at Random Jottings obviously felt the same, and I am indebted to her for asking Bloomsbury to send me a proof copy to review of Mary Ann Shaffer‘s novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. In fact, lovely Steph from Bloomsbury sent 12 books, but my Reader’s Block struck at the same time, and I’m only now able to pay proper attention to the beautiful pile of books. This one had to come first.
It’s been a while since I read an epistolary novel – I think the last was Fanny Burney’s Evelina, (that is letters, isn’t it?) or perhaps the joyous Pamela, which repeats the same letter more or less every page anyway (oo, almost caught by my master in some thin disguise; wasn’t quite…). My sentences do tend to wander off into the obscure, don’t they! ANYWAY, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society takes the form of letters to and from writer Juliet Ashton, in 1946. She has become popular under her pseudonym Izzy Bickerstaff, writing Izzy Bickerstaff Goes To War – which put me in mind of EM Delafield and The Provincial Lady in Wartime, which is all to the good. She describes herself in one of her letters, saving me the trouble of doing so:

‘I am thirty-three years old… In a good mood, I call my hair chestnut with gold glints. In a bad mood, I call it mousy brown. It wasn’t a windy day [in a photo]; my hair always looks like that. Naturally curly hair is a curse, and don’t ever let anyone tell you different. My eyes are hazel. While I am slender, I am not tall enough to suit me.’

I think I fell in love with Juliet when she revealed that a)she had also written an unpopular biography of my favourite Bronte sister, Anne – and b)that she broke up with her fiance when she found him ‘sitting on the low stool in front of my bookcase, surrounded by cardboard boxes. He was sealing the last one with tape and string. There were eight boxes – eight boxes of my books bound up and ready for the basement!’ What is more, he’d replaced her books with his sporting trophies. Obviously he had to go.

All this has happened before the novel opens – Juliet is in the throes of trying to find material for a new book. Her correspondance is with her loveable publisher Sidney and his sister Sophie, until out of the blue a letter arrives from a Guernsey farmer, Dawsey Adams, who has found her address inside a secondhand copy of Charles Lamb. Juliet gets the idea to write about Guernsey under Nazi Occupation – and strikes up a correspondance with several Guernsey residents (shy Dawsey; eccentric Isola; fisherman Eben) and decides to visit them to find out more. The letters continue to those back home, including would-be lover Markham Reynolds, and Juliet’s life becomes increasingly bound up in Guernsey and its inhabitants.

So what is ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’? To cover up the eating of an illicit pig (one of the things Nazi Occupants forbade) quick-thinking Elizabeth says that they were at a literary society – to make the story believable, they start one up. And the sustenance is in the form of potato peel pie, being all the food they could find. Elizabeth – who was sent away to a Continental prison during the war, and has not returned – becomes the central figure of these people and the novel, despite her protracted absence.

Like many people, I suspect, I knew little about the wartime occupation of the Channel Islands – Mary Ann Shaffer’s novel is so illuminating about the conditions and experiences of those being controlled, but more than that, she creates unique and sympathetic characters. There are some upsetting details, but never gratuitously harrowing – Mary Ann Shaffer obviously knows how much more affecting it is to give us lovable characters and then see how the situation changed them. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is full of such characters – I worried that there were so many letter-writers, but they swiftly became identifiable and dear to me. Above all else, the novel is warm, funny and lovingly written. Bloomsbury plan a large-scale advertising campaign for this novel when it is published in August (sorry! you’ll have to wait) and no novel deserves it more – it is sad that Shaffer passed away before she could see her novel published, but she died knowing that it would be, which must have been a great joy.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is something special – Juliet Ashton is a protagonist with just the right levels of humour, fondness and self-deprecation (‘Oh, I can see it all now: no one will buy my books, and I’ll ply Sidney with tattered, illegible manuscripts, which he’ll pretend to publish out of pity. Doddering and muttering, I’ll wander the streets carrying my pathetic turnips in a string bag, with newspaper tucked into my shoes’.) The characters are an ensemble cast, you’ll love the lot of ’em, and fall in love with Guernsey too. I confidently predict that potato peel pie will be plat du jour up and down the country all August. Maybe.

Truly, Madly, Deeply

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Flame Books are fast becoming one of my favourite independent publishers – perhaps this is a hasty decision to make on the basis of having read two of their output, but already I am sensing a definite Flamesque quality. They are novels of brave, textured writing, dealing with ordinary people experiencing the extraordinary. Confused, intricate relationships between flawed humans – with exceptional writing ability to boot.

Tru by Eric Melbye was sent to me quite a while ago, and it is through no fault of the book’s inviting (if slightly haunting) cover that it has taken this long to read. I just hope I can now do it justice, since I have been battling with a dreadful internet connection for over an hour, and have reached the end of my tether, as Our Vicar’s Wife occasionally says. [N.B. this was written yesterday, and I gave up…]

The ‘Tru’ in question is Gertrude Hayes, resident in an old people’s home and member of an amusing ‘gang’ there – a collection of disparate characters, levelled together by their grouping at this final home, waiting for the inevitable. Tru’s closest friend Agnes, dramatic and in the onset of dementia, gives her a journal for her birthday: “The journal is the destination”, as she says. Tru decides to record her history, her guilt about her family, the misadventures which led to this point in her life. From then onwards, the narrative is shown through journal entries (though this is rarely evident except at the beginning of chapters, and never annoying or intrusive as even Anne Bronte was when she used the device). This motley assortment of the aged occupy some chapters; the rest charts Tru’s childhood, through early tragedies and even earlier pregnancy; the fragile and mysterious relationship she has with her ethereal daughter, Maddie; echoes of longing and searching throughout the annals of her past. She lives in a dead-end town – ‘Delamondians don’t bother to understand a thing, only judge it’ – always known as The Hayes Girl, and cannot escape the unfriendly eyes of those surrounding her.

That sounds a bit glum, doesn’t it? In synopsis, it is rather – but Tru’s story, in its mixture of remembering and imagining, is told with a humour and understanding which captivate rather than repel, and feels more like truth than anything else. You can find truth discomforting, but cannot challenge the teller. Melbye’s writing is honest in a way which makes the title Tru so apposite, despite being fiction. In the old people’s home, Agnes ‘remembered days, or made them up. It’s all the same now.’ This threading of recollection and invention in Tru’s narrative creates an emotional honesty, which even an autobiography would rarely achieve. And there are also many beautiful images amongst the loss; I liked: ‘She was like a shard of broken glass, beautiful and dangerous and hardly there.’

A difficult book to categorise, and not like much that I’ve read before – except, as I say, similarites with The Bestowing Sun. I can’t wait to see what else Flame Books has to offer.

Welly-Throwing

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Today’s title is one of the suggestions I’ve had, in the face of Readers’ Block (or, since I’m just one person, Reader’s Block) – I *think* I did do welly-throwing – or welly-wanging – at a village fete once, but I’m probably not ready to take it up as an Olympic sport just yet. So I’ll carry on trying to shift the block, and get back to my normal Stuck position. Annoyingly, a headache has been added to the mix. On the bright side, today I completed my European Computer Driving Licence, which can be stuck squarely onto my CV, though it would be an exaggeration to say I yet understood Access or the finer workings of Excel. Part of the amusement of the course was trying to unlearn everything since about 1998, when the test was made. Formating a floppy disk, anyone?

The book I’m currently reading bits of here and there is The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee, which I bought when meeting online friends in London. It’s ‘a memoir, a history’ of Buzbee’s life with books – working in a bookshop, working as a publisher’s sales rep, just generally living and loving books – and interspersed with this is the history of books and booksellers. What a lot of times the word ‘book’ was in that sentence – what’s the opposite of aversion therapy? The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop isn’t overly sentimental, since Buzbee has had to understand the commodity aspect of books, but he speaks with a voice which every booklover will recognise and respond to:

When I walk into a bookstore, any bookstore, first thing in the morning, I’m flooded with a sense of hushed excitement. I shouldn’t feel this way. I’ve spent most of my adult life working in bookstores, either as a bookseller or a publisher’s sales rep, and even though I no longer work in the business, as an incurable reader I find myself in a bookstore at least five times a week. Shouldn’t I be blase about it all by now? In the quiet of such a morning, however, the store’s displays stacked squarely and its shelves tidy and promising, I know that this is no mere shop. When a bookstore opens its doors, the rest of the world enters, too, the days’ weather and the day’s news, the streams of customers, and of course the boxes of books and the many other worlds they contain – books of facts and truths, books newly written and those first read centuries before, books of great relevance and of absolute banality. Standing in the middle of this confluence, I can’t help but feel the possibility of the universe unfolding a little, once upon a time.

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is materially beautiful, with deckled edges and thick paper, but much more significant is the kindred spirit you’ll find inside. If anything can make me remember how much I love books, this should do it.

50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About

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It’s been a while since I added to the ongoing, no-particular-order list of 50 Books I think you’d love, but would be unlikely to see on 3 for 2 tables or even in bookshops at all. It’s a list of potential gems, but also gives you a good idea of the sort of books most at home here at Stuck-in-a-Book.

Today’s entrant was part of a Postal Book Group I’m in, where we pick a book and send it to the next person in the list. Every two months we post a book along, and at the end of the year get back our book with a notebook of comments. Fun, and provides such wonderful books as (drumroll, please) The Long Afternoon by Giles Waterfield. So, thank you Angela for bringing it to my attention.

The Long Afternoon (published in 2000) isn’t a riveting title, is it, but does work on two levels – it is the long afternoon of Henry and Helen Williamson’s marriage, in the long afternoon approaching the First World War, and between the wars, for the Brits too old to fight who took up residence on the Riviera. That is where this novel takes place – the first chapter opens in November 1912, in Lou Paradou, with Helen Williamson enthusiastically looking over a house with an estate agent.

Henry smiled so sweetly, and with such affection, and waved at her and left the carriage and called to her, “Jolly nice place, darling!” It was easy from this distance to communicate with someone below, however far they might seem. She called back, “Darling, I think it’s lovely,” and then, remembering the agent who though he said he did not speak English certainly must understand it, added, “I mean there are problems but it is very pleasant,” and felt absurd for having used such a limiting English word. Not just pleasant but exquisite, sheltered, pure…

It is from this beautiful home, with a third person narration still suffused by Helen’s uncertain personality, that we see the onset of the First World War and, later, the Second. The cracks show in the faux-English community on the Riviera, and the lives of soldiers overlap and challenge the Williamsons’ luxury.

More subtly, The Long Afternoon is a psychological portrait of Helen Williamson – who spends one day a week in bed, for the sake of her nerves – and as the novel progresses we hear more and more from her children and their Scottish governess, throwing complicating light upon her presentation of herself.

Giles Waterfield’s first novel is a gentle examination of large-scale tragedies and small-scale frailties – this is no simple dismissal of the indolent of the wars, but a beautiful and elegant portrayal of a very real couple in destructively surreal surroundings. The Long Afternoon is impossible not to admire, and difficult not to love.

Halfway to Venus

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Halfway to Venus sounds like a Science Fiction novel… but when the Venus in question is of the de Milo variety, things become clear. I don’t know how to introduce this non-fiction book, as… well, it is about living with one arm, and the history of amputation in literature and reality. But Sarah Anderson, the author, says how much she hates to be thought of as “the woman with one arm” – and Halfway to Venus shouldn’t simply be labelled “the book by the woman with one arm”.

Sarah Anderson (pictured below, in a photograph by John Swannell) had synovial sarcoma, a variety of cancer, as a child – which led her to have her left arm amputated at the age of ten. ‘I recall feeling that if I could only put into words how much I didn’t want this to happen, they would have to listen to me; and the fact that I obviously hadn’t been eloquent enough I saw as some kind of failure on my part.’ Anderson’s coping strategy, she writes, was not mentioning it; assuming others couldn’t notice. Amazingly, Sarah was 19 before she asked her parents, “What happened to my arm?” The central strand of Halfway to Venus narrates her experiences whilst growing up, and also career-wise and relationship-wise – from the travel bookshop which proved inspiration for Notting Hill to potential ‘acrotomophiles’, who are attracted to ‘amputees’. In fact, much of Anderson’s examination is not herself, but others – a refrain throughout is that other people are the major issue; trying to anticipate their reactions, but resenting having to be the one to smooth things along.

This, as I said, is the central thread – but Halfway to Venus is so much more. I was a little uncertain about reading the book, lest it be simply misery lit. of the variety which pervades all bookshops, but nothing could be further from the truth. Anderson embarks upon a fascinating and very readable history of amputation, lack of limbs, and the arm and hand as considered through time. As long ago as AD 80, Quintilian wrote ‘other portions of the body merely help the speaker, whereas the hands may almost be said to speak’ So many facts leapt from the page – did you know, for instance, that nine out of ten people can’t identify their own hand from a selection of photographs?
Woven alongside Anderson’s autobiographical narrative, and this anatomical history, are excerpts from many other books, mostly autobiographical, concerning life without certain limbs or hands or feet. These offer a rich collection of viewpoints – and, unsurprisingly, those writing them are as different from each other as any other selection of people. Anderson’s own feelings towards her amputated arm aren’t clear cut either – sometimes she writes that she hates any reference being made; at other times she appreciates the directness of Americans she met. She enjoys participating in a One-Armed Dove Hunt (!!), but usually avoids any such grouping. A few things baffled me – she, and many others, consider prosphetics as trying to ‘be something you’re not’. I wear glasses – further down the spectrum, but still a prosphetic, in as much as it gives my eyes sight they wouldn’t have in my unaided state. Where can the line be drawn?

It is to Anderson’s credit that Halfway to Venus brings out so many questions and reflections and reactions. A very honest book of autobiography, it is also a fascinating compedium, and with an engaging writing style which is all too often omitted from well-researched non-fiction.

Before I go, must just mention a new blog – Oxford-reader – as you can see, from the same hallowed city as Stuck-in-a-Book, and with many of the same tastes. Do go along and toast her addition to the blogosphere.

Well-Tempered

StuckinaBook All , 8 Comments

It is inevitable that any book where a pupil and teacher have a dalliance will be compared to Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal. William Coles’ novel The Well-Tempered Clavier wouldn’t suffer in such a comparison – but it is rather more. Notes on a Scandal meets Othello, if you will. Let me explain.

Set in the most famous school in England, Eton (which the author attended as a pupil), The Well-Tempered Clavier sees seventeen-year-old Kim fall in love with his piano teacher, India. This simple love story is the central thread through an engaging and revealing narrative of Eton life – the customs and vocabularly; the friendships between boys and the near absence of girls (I didn’t realise before that masters’ daughters were allowed to attend). Oddly, something which really impressed me in Coles’ writing was how he gave the impression of heat – the stifling temperatures, especially under the layers of Eton uniform, was described so evocatively that I needed to fan myself while reading… But The Well-Tempered Clavier is never less than compelling. Documenting the Eton life from within, as it were, gives those of us who attended their local comprehensive a fascinating glimpse, without treating the boys like zoo animals. Having been to Oxford, goodness knows I understand what it’s like to have my home and place of work treated as a tourist attraction… but nothing like Eton. Personally, I can’t think of anything crueler than sending a child to boarding school, especially from the age of six, and can’t think of any situation, other than an orphan’s, where it could be thought the best option. I wonder whether any of you attended one? Or, even if not, what you think?

Anyway, that’s an aside. So why the title to Coles’ novel? Kim first hears India while she is playing from Bach’s ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’, a selection of Preludes and Fugues for piano which range from approachable to impossible. Each chapter of the novel is subtitled by one of the Preludes, and in some way relates to it – usually Kim is playing it, or hears India playing. Since I have a copy of the piano music, I thought I’d play along with the chapters, which is a nice way to do it. If you can’t play the piano, try playing a CD or something, while reading the appropriate chapters. I was just very grateful that Coles hadn’t used Fugues for chapter headings… much more difficult.

Comparisons with Notes on a Scandal aren’t really just. There is nothing needy or sordid or demoralising about the nature of Kim and India’s relationship. It is a beautiful romance, in the true sense of the word ‘romance’, which takes only a frisson from the fact that they’re pupil/teacher. More sex than you might like in a book, but it is certainly secondary to the romance and genuine love. Sadly, this is where Othello steps in. The comparison is made quite overtly – Kim’s class are reading Othello, and Kim has more than a little in common with The Moor of Venice himself. An ineluctable jealousy stalks him – even his self-awareness cannot prevent it corrupting his relationships, and it looks as though it might infect even his reciprocated love for India…

The Well-Tempered Clavier is a beautiful book, managing to use a simple narrative voice without a consequently bland style – honesty, beauty, and passion pervade the novel, but so do humour, youthfulness and energy. Do go and get a copy, and pick up a Bach CD while you’re there.

“But I’ve got some lazing to do…”

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Every now and then, you need a book that is unashamedly silly. And when you’re feline like that (a-ha-ha) you need a book about cats. Obviously.

My personal favourite is on Amazon here – Jeffrey Brown’s observations are astute, witty and very catty… So, when Molly Brandenburg offered me a review copy of Everyday Cat Excuses, the only answer I was going to give was “Yes! Yes, cats!” I don’t really know how I can give a book review of a book like this. Dostoevsky it ain’t, but I rather think old Fyodor would have enjoyed flicking through this book.

Those of us who have owned cats, or currently own cats, know that they’re not the most active and servile of creatures. They might be able to recognise their own name, but aren’t stupid enough to pay any heedance to it. They know when it’s dinner time, and the rest of the itinerary is on their terms. So, if you ask them to do something, it’s more or less a given that they’ll have an excuse…

And so Molly draws cartoons depicting these excuses. An example is pictured – it’s the cartoon which is a great deal more polished than mine! My favourites are the little series of “Because I need to go outside.” “Actually, I need to go inside.” “Inside? Craziness – outside for me, please”. And so on. (I paraphrase). There is so much to observe in our feline friends. For a novel with a great cat, I recommend Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Mother and Son. For an amusing present to a cat lover, do check out either Molly’s book, or Jeffrey Brown’s (linked to above).

Something properly literary soon, promise!

Yellow

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I have been having good luck with books recently. You may remember that I impulsively bought Yellow by Janni Visman, after having barcoded it in the Bodleian – based on the blurb and the cover, and the fact that Amazon has lots going for a penny. Well, I couldn’t resist – it’s now been read, and I can declare it excellent.

Stella is agoraphobic, to the extent that she cannot leave her flat at all. She lives there with her partner, Ivan, and her cat, George. When Ivan moved in, she made three rules:

No stories from the past.
No unnecessary anecdotes.
No questions.

“Suits me fine,” he said.

Stella is also neurotic. Not in a Monica-from-Friends-hilarious-way, but in a studied attention to details and fixation with routine. She wears the same colour shoes for months, and the decision to change from blue to red is momentous. As an aromatherapist, she has a steady stream of clients come to her treatment room – all of whom call her Ms. Lewis, and from whom overtures of friendship are unwelcome. Throughout the novel, Stella treats her own and others dilemmas with treatments from the ordered phials in the one metre square cabinet: ‘To a glass of water I add five drops of Bach Flower Remedy White Chestnut for “constant worrying thoughts and/or mental arguments”. I note I need to order another bottle.’

One day Ivan is wearing an old gold bracelet with his name on it, and ‘True love forever over every single rainbow XXX S.L 1978’ inscribed inside. Who is S.L.? They are Stella’s initials – they are the initials of her sister, Skye. Whose else could they be? ‘Yellow is the colour of gas, of fear, of jealousy.’ As her partner, her sister, her new neighbour and even her cat begin to behave strangely, Stella’s jealousy and paranoia become deeper and deeper and increasingly damaging. But is there some justification?

Janni Visman’s novel is short, but immensely powerful. The first person narrative is sparse and often detached; the voice of a woman trying to control her worries by ordering them. As a portrait of paranoia, this is intense and affective – gripping and taut, occasionally disturbing but always compelling.

Visman cites Hitchcock’s Vertigo as partial inspiration (see a great interview here), but (especially since she trained as a fine artist) this painting, shown alongside the book, could have been made for the book, and was the bookmark I used – Vilhelm Hammershoi’s Interior, Sunlight on the Floor 1906.

More Mitfords…

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I couldn’t leave it just at the Mitford letters, now, could I?

Having fallen down before Deborah in a frenzy of adulation, I had to seek out Counting My Chickens… and other home thoughts by Debo, or the Duchess of Devonshire as such as I should call her. It’s a collection of all sorts of writings Deborah has published in newspapers and periodicals over the years (most notably the British Goat Society Yearbook 1972); lots of short articles and thoughts, something to dip in and out of.

Deborah isn’t a natural prose writer, not in the way Nancy was. She frequently claims not to be able to read, let alone write (though Charlotte Mosley notes in The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters ‘Diana believed that unlike most people who pretend to have read books that they have not, Deborah pretended not to have read books that she had’.) Counting My Chickens, accordingly, is no sweeping grand narrative – but in the vignettesque pieces, Deborah demonstrates a gently witty and loveable nature. Who can fail to adore her when, asked to choose her ten books for a Trans Siberian Railway (!), she writes ‘My third book is Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Between the Woods and the Water. I am sorry to say I have not read it…’

Most of Counting My Chickens is little thoughts, connected to Chatsworth or the countryside – her opinions are sometimes applaudable, sometimes baffling (why doesn’t she like female weather forecasters?), but always entertaining or interesting. She has a habit of writing a statement, and simply putting ‘Good.’ as the next sentence. What a flood of ink could be saved if other authors used rhetoric so simple!

To be honest, Deborah Mitford could have written her views concerning the telephone directory, or a list of her favourite three digit numbers, and I’d have lapped it up. She is, after all, more or less like a sister to me now. A somewhat older sister, it must be said, but a sister nonetheless. I wonder what on earth she’d make of that – seeing as I am vegetarian, never milked a cow, and have been known to say ‘talking with’ when I mean ‘talking to’…

My next Mitford read will be Hons and Rebels by Jessica – a few of you rightly said that I should read more by or about Decca before judging her, so I shall give her the benefit of the doubt…!

By the way, I’m keeping a list of the Alphabet Meme as it goes on through the blogs, so if you’ve done one, just let me know…

Mitfordmania

StuckinaBook All , 12 Comments

I am forlorn. There is no other word for it. Having started it in November, I am drawing to the final pages of The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters. Only two sisters are still alive, and I have lived every period of their lives. It is rare, I must confess, that I want a book to continue when I’ve come to the end. Almost always I am happy to finish and move onto the next, even if I’ve really enjoyed reading the book. It is astonishing that an 800+ page book should leave me wanting more.

When I started The Mitfords in November, I had heard of Nancy, Jessica and Diana, though got them a little mixed up, and had no idea about the rest of them. I knew they were fairly posh, and had written some books between them, of which I had only read The Pursuit of Love and letters between Nancy and Heywood Hill. Oh, those early days of reading the letters, when I had constantly to flick to the front, to work out which one Pamela was and whether or not she was older than Diana, and whether or not Jessica was married yet and if Unity was two or twelve or twenty. How far away such ignorance now seems! I can name them all in order of births and deaths, state political leanings; spouses; sororal favourites and antagonisms; every bit of their characters which could be revealed in these letters.

As Jo Rowling says: ‘A novelist would never get away with inventing this: a correspondence spanning eight decades, written from locations including Chatsworth and Holloway Prison, between six original and talented women who numbered among their friends Evelyn Waugh, Maya Angelou, J. F. Kennedy and Adolf Hitler’. As a social document alone, this book would be one of the most important of recent years. Throw in six unique, unmistakable characters, gifted women with affection and great humour – The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters is unquestionably the best book I’ve read thus far in 2008, and I can’t see it being bettered before the year is out.

It is impossible to read about Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah without emerging with favourites. Seeing their true selves exposed and shared, I couldn’t help form opinions and imaginary kindred spirits. So, I did warm to – no, strike that, adore – Deborah (indisputably the heroine of the book) for her warmth, lovingness, refusal to adopt a political viewpoint which would damage her sisterly relationships. Witty, too, without the barbs some of her sisters planted. Pamela is adorable too, forever known as Woman for her unfeminine qualities, but she is the least garralous sister. The only sister I couldn’t stand by the end of the collection was Jessica – I think it unacceptable to cut a sister from your life because they have different political leanings. Extreme ones, on both sides, yes – but the ties of siblingship are above such things. And a minor quibble over a scrapbook was being dregged up by Jessica FIFTEEN YEARS after the event happened. For goodness’ sake, woman!

Such are the strong reactions The Mitfords provokes, you see… and anyone else reading it will form different alliances, I daresay. Hopefully anyone staying away from this collection because of the Mitford reputation will be swayed. Yes, they were rich, and sometimes a little eccentric – their sense of humour and catchphrases take some getting used to, but isn’t that true of all families? I long, now, to say “do admit!” when I mean “you must admit that’s funny”, or “screamed” for “was amused”. Their range of nicknames is baffling, but delightfully so – and, once I got the hang of it, it felt rather like I’d been invited into the family group. Not quite into the group, actually, of course – but with the privileged position of benevolent eavesdropping…

Utterly fascinating, endlessly moving (I gasped aloud at a miscarriage one sister suffered) this collection of letters is a treasure chest and a social document; a comedy and a history; unavoidably brilliant without the least pretension to being anything other than the letters between six sisters.