Also Known as Guts

Nancy Mitford, a Memoir By Harold Acton

Harper, 252 pp., $10 The hardest of all class struggles is not to get to the top but to stay there, the struggle to hang on, and this book about Nancy Mitford, one of the blithest spirits of “old” England, tells us the price of it. Miss Mitford was bred to high station, born in the Edwardian era as one of the lot of famous Mitford sisters, which included Diana, wife of Sir Oswald Mosley; Unity, the votary of Hitler, and the Duchess of Devonshire. She knew fame as a writer; but her real position was given her by birth and ironclad by the group of aristocrats, especially writers and aesthetes, who liked and loved her. Until the later years, when her books about Madame de Pompadour and Louis XIV made a popular success of her wit and sympathy, there was never enough money. But the ever-present enemy was that force which threatened at every turn to sap the spiritual and social power of the topmost class—and which abetted vulgarity, bad taste, crude manners, brutality of sentiment, monstrosity of style, and blindness of developed perception.

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Nicholas King

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Nancy Mitford, a Memoir By Harold Acton

Harper, 252 pp., $10 The hardest of all class struggles is not to get to the top but to stay there, the struggle to hang on, and this book about Nancy Mitford, one of the blithest spirits of “old” England, tells us the price of it. Miss Mitford was bred to high station, born in the Edwardian era as one of the lot of famous Mitford sisters, which included Diana, wife of Sir Oswald Mosley; Unity, the votary of Hitler, and the Duchess of Devonshire. She knew fame as a writer; but her real position was given her by birth and ironclad by the group of aristocrats, especially writers and aesthetes, who liked and loved her. Until the later years, when her books about Madame de Pompadour and Louis XIV made a popular success of her wit and sympathy, there was never enough money. But the ever-present enemy was that force which threatened at every turn to sap the spiritual and social power of the topmost class—and which abetted vulgarity, bad taste, crude manners, brutality of sentiment, monstrosity of style, and blindness of developed perception.