Wigs on the Green

Wigs on the Green
Author: Nancy Mitford
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2010-08-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307741370

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.

Penguin Readers Level 5: The Pursuit of Love (ELT Graded Reader)

Penguin Readers Level 5: The Pursuit of Love (ELT Graded Reader)
Author: Nancy Mitford
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 90
Release: 2023-02-02
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0241589134

Penguin Readers is an ELT graded reader series. Please note that the eBook edition does NOT include access to the audio edition and digital book. Written for learners of English as a foreign language, each title includes carefully adapted text, new illustrations and language learning exercises. Titles include popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction, introducing language learners to bestselling authors and compelling content. The eight levels of Penguin Readers follow the Common European Framework of Reference for language learning (CEFR). Exercises at the back of each Reader help language learners to practise grammar, vocabulary, and key exam skills. Before, during and after-reading questions test readers' story comprehension and develop vocabulary. The Pursuit of Love, a Level 5 Reader, is B1 in the CEFR framework. The text is made up of sentences with up to four clauses, introducing present perfect continuous, past perfect, reported speech and second conditional. It is well supported by illustrations, which appear regularly. The Pursuit of Love is about the love adventures of Fanny Logan's cousin, Linda Radlett, who is beautiful, brave and fun. Linda finally finds love and seems happy, but this is the 1930s and her country will soon go to war with Germany. What will happen to Linda then? Visit the Penguin Readers website Register to access online resources including tests, worksheets and answer keys. Exclusively with the print edition, readers can unlock a digital book and audio edition (not available with the eBook).

Voltaire in Love

Voltaire in Love
Author: Nancy Mitford
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2012-11-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1590175786

The inimitable Nancy Mitford’s account of Voltaire’s fifteen-year relationship with the Marquise du Châtelet—the renowned mathematician who introduced Isaac Newton’s revolutionary new physics to France—is a spirited romp in the company of two extraordinary individuals as well as an erudite and gossipy guide to French high society during the Enlightenment. Mitford’s story is as delicious as it is complicated. The marquise was in love with another mathematician, Maupertuis, while she had an unexpected rival for Voltaire’s affections in the future Frederick the Great of Prussia (and later in the philosophe’s own niece). There was, at least, no jealous husband to contend with: the Marquis du Châtelet, Mitford assures us, behaved perfectly. The beau monde of Paris was, however, distraught at the idea of the lovers’ brilliant conversation going to waste on the windswept hills of Champagne, site of the Château de Cirey, where experimental laboratories, a darkroom, and a library of more than twenty-one thousand volumes enabled them to pursue their amours philosophiques. From time to time the threat of impending arrest would send Voltaire scurrying across the border into Holland, but his irrepressible charm—and the interventions of powerful friends—always made it possible for him resume his studies with the cherished marquise.

The Horror of Love

The Horror of Love
Author: Lisa Hilton
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2012-12-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1453271554

The dramatic love story of two extraordinary individuals--Nancy Mitford and free French commander Gaston Palewski--living in extraordinary times. “Oh, the horror of love!” Nancy Mitford once exclaimed to her sister Diana Mosley. Elegant and intelligent, Nancy was a reknowned wit and a popular author. Yet this bright, waspish woman gave her heart to a well-known philanderer who went on to marry another woman. Was Nancy that unremarkable thing—a deluded lover—or was she a remarkable woman engaged in a sophisticated love affair? Gaston Palewski was a Free French commander and one of the most influential politicians in post-war Europe. She supported him throughout his tumultuous career and he inspired some of her best work, including The Pursuit of Love. Lisa Hilton’s provocative and emotionally challenging book reveals how, with discipline, gentleness, and a great deal of elegance, Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski achieved an affair of the heart.

The Blessing

The Blessing
Author: Nancy Mitford
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2015-11-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0241976804

The Blessing by Nancy Mitford It isn't just Nanny who finds it difficult in France when Grace and her young son Sigi are finally able to join her dashing aristocratic husband Charles-Edouard after the war. For Grace is out of her depth among the fashionably dressed and immaculately coiffured French women, and shocked by their relentless gossiping and bedhopping. When she discovers her husband's tendency to lust after every pretty girl he sees, it looks like trouble. And things get even more complicated when little Sigi steps in . . . The Blessing is a hilarious tale of love, fidelity, and the English abroad, tailored as brilliantly as a New Look Dior suit. 'Entirely original, inimitable and irresistible' Spectator 'Deliciously funny' Evelyn Waugh 'Utter, utter bliss' Daily Mail

Christmas Pudding

Christmas Pudding
Author: Nancy Mitford
Publisher: Penguin Group
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780241342862

The formidable fox-hunting obsessed Lady Bobbin has put together a Christmas house party at Compton Bobbin, including her rebellious daughter Philadelphia, the girl's pompous suitor, a couple of children obsessed with newspaper death notices, and an aspiring writer whose deadly (in more ways than one) serious first novel has been acclaimed as the funniest book of the year, to his utter dismay. And then there is beautiful ex courtesan Amabelle Fortescue and her group of guests staying in a nearby cottage ... As the house parties starts to unravel, so the jokes increase- this is Nancy Mitford's second novel and one of her earliest forays into the world of the Bright Young Things.

Highland Fling

Highland Fling
Author: Nancy Mitford
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2013-09-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0345806964

In Highland Fling—Nancy Mitford’s first novel, published in 1931—a set of completely incompatible and hilariously eccentric characters collide in a Scottish castle, where bright young things play pranks on their stodgy elders until the frothy plot climaxes in ghost sightings and a dramatic fire. Inspired in part by Mitford’s youthful infatuation with a Scottish aristocrat, her story follows young Jane Dacre to a shooting party at Dulloch Castle, where she tramps around a damp and chilly moor on a hunting expedition with formidable Lady Prague, xenophobic General Murgatroyd, one-eyed Admiral Wenceslaus, and an assortment of other ancient and gouty peers of the realm, while falling in love with Albert, a surrealist painter with a mischievous sense of humor. Lighthearted and sparkling with witty banter, Highland Fling was Mitford’s first foray into the delightful fictional world for which the author of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate later became so celebrated. With an Introduction by Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey.

The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street

The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street
Author: John Saumarez Smith
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group USA
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2005-10-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 178101163X

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

The Mitfords

The Mitfords
Author: Charlotte Mosley
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 868
Release: 2008-10-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0061375403

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.

The Sun King

The Sun King
Author: Nancy Mitford
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2012-05-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1590174917

A “devastatingly witty” biography of Louis XIV and the Court of Versailles—at once a historical record of late 17th- and early 18th-century France and a gossip-filled narrative of lovers and rivals, artists and warriors (The New York Times) The Sun King is a dazzling double portrait of Louis XIV and Versailles, the opulent court from which he ruled. With characteristic élan, Nancy Mitford reconstructs the daily life of king and courtiers during France’s golden age, offering vivid sketches of the architects, artists, and gardeners responsible for the creation of the most magnificent palace Europe had yet seen. Mitford lays bare the complex and deadly intrigues in the stateroom and the no less high-stakes power struggles in the bedroom. At the center of it all is Louis XIV himself, the demanding, mercurial, but remarkably resilient sovereign who guided France through nearly three quarters of the Grand Siècle. Brimming with sumptuous detail and delicious bons mots, and written in a witty, conversational style, The Sun King restores a distant glittering century to vibrant life.