Unity Mitford

Tuesday

Anne Chisholm

Jessica was the only Mitford worth taking seriously

Can there really be any point in yet another fat book about one of the Mitford sisters? Their antics have been appearing in print since the late 1940s, when the eldest – clever, waspish Nancy – displayed their family eccentricities in her sparkling novel The Pursuit of Love. Since then, by a rough count, there have been 15 biographies, individual and joint, including three of both Nancy and Jessica, two vast compendiums of correspondence and five autobiographies by four of the sisters (Jessica wrote two). Have we not had enough of the unreconstructed paterfamilias Lord Redesdale (or Farv); of the Hons (airing) Cupboard, where the girls would take refuge at

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Jew and non-Jew: Unity Mitford and aristocratic anti-Semitism

I was touched but not surprised that, despite his illness, the King attended the 80th anniversary of the ‘liberation’ of Auschwitz-Birkenau this week. His paternal grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was a rescuer. She hid the Cohen family in her house in Athens and is honoured as a ‘righteous’ gentile at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, where she is buried on the Mount of Olives. A less friendly aristocrat was Unity Mitford, whose views were probably a more accurate reflection of her class. Her newly published diary describes her friendship with Adolf Hitler. Here is a typical entry: ‘Lunch Osteria 2.30. THE FüHRER comes 3.15 after I have finished lunch. After