A most superior street

Nancy Mitford did not enjoy readers’ letters, according to Harold Acton’s sprightly memoir (how unlike us, Miss Beale and Miss Buss). But she did enjoy this one from a certain Mavis Mitford-Potts, following the enormous success of her first historical biography, Madame de Pompadour. It was along these lines: ‘I live alone in a bungalow and shall soon no doubt be murdered by one of the many people who think all Mitfords better dead’ and had the PS: ‘Please don’t think I admire your idiotic books.’ Nancy Mitford described this missive as ‘a breath of fresh air’ compared to the stack of fan-letters she was receiving: ‘It’s so odd why they should think one should want to know their boring reactions to one’s work.’

Perhaps there is an element of Mitford-tease about this letter, written to a close friend (after all the point was being made about the stack of fan-mail). Fortunately there was a category, a large category, of people with whom Nancy Mitford enjoyed exchanging letters, over many years, and these included some of the cleverest and most original people of her generation. This is the centenary year of Nancy Mitford’s birth — in November 1904 — and to celebrate it John Saumarez Smith has edited an elegant and entertaining vignette, The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street. Nancy had worked at the eponymous bookshop in the war, and when she settled in Paris thereafter, kept in touch with Heywood Hill, then running the Curzon Street shop, and his colleagues (Saumarez Smith, the editor, has now replaced Hill, not only at Curzon Street, but as an arbiter of what bien-pensant people should be reading).

There are discreet hints of feuds at and around the shop, Hill and his wife somehow falling out with the next regime, Handasyde Buchanan and his wife, but the reader is left mainly in ignorance about this; and Nancy Mitford herself remained good friends with both parties (although one does note that neither the Hills nor the Buchanans went to her funeral, each couple fearing that the other would be there).