Nancy Mitford

A biography that captures both the hilarity and pathos of an extraordinary woman and a remarkable life.

Selina Hastings has written a book which Nancy Mitford would have been proud to write herself

Selina Hastings is a writer and journalist, biographer of Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Rosamund Lehmann and, in The Red Earl, of her father. 
 
She is the winner of the Marsh Biography Prize, the Spear's Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Award.

Nancy Mitford was witty, intelligent, often acerbic, a great tease and an acute observer of upper-class English idiosyncrasies. With the publication of her novels, above all The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing, she became a huge bestseller and a household name. 
 
An inspired letter writer, she wrote almost daily to a wide variety of correspondents, among them Evelyn Waugh, Harold Action, John Betjeman, Lord Berners, Lady Seafield, and, of course, her sisters. 
 
Selina Hastings captures equally the gaiety and frivolity and the unhappy truth of Nancy Mitford's life: her failed marriage and her long, unfulfilled relationship with 'the Colonel' contrasting sharply with literary celebrity and glittering social success. Selina Hastings has written a biography that is superbly entertaining and clear-eyed, of a life that Diana Mosley spoke of as being 'so sad one can hardly bear to contemplate it'.

A Life

Rosamond Lehmann

'Mischief, gossip, acuity and admiration - not to be missed' Sunday Times

I can think of few biographies that are as unputdownable as a novel, but Selina Hastings has produced one: fluidly written, witty, detached yet utterly gripping-deeply touching: a triumph of the biographer's art

A funny and marvellously readable study of a woman who was incurably addicted to love

Finely textured, exceptionally perceptive and wonderfully readable-the best possible tribute; an understanding, clear-eyed portrait

So intelligently written that you linger over the phrasing, her account blends wit, mischief, gossip, acuity and admiration... Shrewd, relaxed, understanding, stylish and not to be missed

Careful and sympathetic - striking a delicate balance between factual detail and evocative description

The life of Rosamond Lehmann was as romantic and harrowing as that of any of her fictional heroines. Her first novel, the shocking Dusty Answer, became wildly successful launching her career as a novelist and, just as her novels depicted the tempestuous lives of her heroines, Rosamond's personal life would be full of heartbreaking affairs and lost loves. 
 
Escaping from a disastrous early marriage Rosamond moved right into the heart of Bloomsbury society with Wogan Philipps. Later on she would embark on the most important love affair of her life, with the poet Cecil Day Lewis; nine years later he abandoned her for a young actress - a betrayal from which she would never recover. 
 
Selina Hastings masterfully creates a portrait of a woman whose dramatic life, work and relationships criss-crossed the cultural, literary and political landscape of England in the middle of the twentieth century.

Selina Hastings

A wonderful biography... Elegant, deft and restrained

[An] elegantly written, intimate biography... This is a remarkably candid, minutely detailed and compulsively readable book about a life lived to the full

So good, so full of naughty detail, evocation and grudging affection that you can enjoy it without ever having to read the works of Sybille Bedford

Selina Hastings's wonderful, gossipy biography is a gem

[Bedford's life is] elegantly related by Selina Hastings

A fantastic read... brings a fundamentally [...] private woman out into the light

I found myself gripped from the first page to the last, astonished by the pace of revelation

Scrupulous [...] remind[s] us that Bedford had a second string to her writerly bow

Rivetingly entertaining... A wonderful chronicle of one life [and] a depiction of a small, vivid, condensed world gone forever

Gracefully written, largely sympathetic, and very gossipy

Hastings is one of our greatest living biographers

An Appetite for Life

'Hastings is one of our greatest living biographers' Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph 
 
Sybille Bedford's life contained all the grand feeling and seismic events of the twentieth century: war and peace, love and trauma, friendship and death. Her father died when she was just fourteen and her mother, a great socialite and litterateur, fell victim to a debilitating morphine addiction. A bon viveur, she roamed from country to country in search of fresh experience, with ear and eye attuned to her surroundings, typewriter at the ready. 
 
Full of intense friendships (Aldous Huxley, Martha Gellhorn and Elizabeth Jane Howard among them), a fierce commitment to the craft of writing, as well as an insatiable appetite for love and sex, Sybille Bedford blazed her own path in her life and her art. 
 
'Selina Hastings' wonderful, gossipy biography is a gem, revealing not just the shy writer, but also the colourful, turbulent 20th-century literary world in which she lived' Sunday Times, Books of the Year 
 
'A wonderful biography' Sara Wheeler, Spectator 
 
'An extraordinary story' The Times 
 
'A richly entertaining biography' Daily Mail, Books of the Year

Sybille Bedford

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Selina Hastings

Praise for Sybille Bedford

A wonderful biography... Elegant, deft and restrained

[An] elegantly written, intimate biography... This is a remarkably candid, minutely detailed and compulsively readable book about a life lived to the full

So good, so full of naughty detail, evocation and grudging affection that you can enjoy it without ever having to read the works of Sybille Bedford

A wonderful biography... Elegant, deft and restrained

[An] elegantly written, intimate biography... This is a remarkably candid, minutely detailed and compulsively readable book about a life lived to the full

So good, so full of naughty detail, evocation and grudging affection that you can enjoy it without ever having to read the works of Sybille Bedford

A wonderful biography... Elegant, deft and restrained

[An] elegantly written, intimate biography... This is a remarkably candid, minutely detailed and compulsively readable book about a life lived to the full

So good, so full of naughty detail, evocation and grudging affection that you can enjoy it without ever having to read the works of Sybille Bedford

Books by Selina Hastings

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