Mary S. Lovell

I picked this biography up last year, having read a couple of Nancy Mitford’s enjoyable and sharply written biographies of historical figures (Madame de Pompadour and The Sun King), but found I couldn’t get into it - perhaps because I didn’t know enough at that point about the rest of this extraordinary family. Then this year I read Nancy’s two most famous novels, the semi-autobiographical The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, followed by Jessica (Decca) Mitford’s autobiography Hons and Rebels - each of which I throughly enjoyed. Drawn in, I finally turned back to Mary Lovell’s biography to find out more. Disappointingly, while I found it fascinating and packed with absorbing detail, I agree with a number of earlier reviewers that it seemed strangely biased against ‘red sheep’ and runaway communist and risk-taker Decca - who, after all, seems to have done a great deal of good in her life through her energy and commitment to civil rights causes and lift-the-lid-style ‘muck-raking’. At the same time it was relatively uncritical, indeed almost fawning, towards Unity and especially Diana, the two Hitler-loving sisters whose unrepentant behaviour is frequently rationalised and downplayed throughout. While I learned much more about ‘Muv’ than I had previously understood, there was little of note about Debo, even less about Pam, and not enough about Nancy, beyond a fairly one-note portrayal as a scathing, even bitchy wit who was unlucky in love. I would like to have understood ‘Farve’ in more depth, too. All in all a compelling but lopsided portrait of one of last century’s most famous families.… (meer)

The glamour of yesteryear is prominent in this book about the French Riviera in the first half of the twentieth century. Many famous figures make appearances - Winston Churchill, Aga Khan, Rita Hayworth - but the center is the Art Deco Château de l’Horizon, a villa owned by American socialite Maxine Elliot that hosted the rich and famous. This book makes for fun reading and I appreciated the details included about the lives of this glamorous social set, but it's certainly not a critical assessment of the wealth and social privilege within which these figures existed.… (meer)