And at their dark heart, beloved but unstable Unity, in love with Hitler and obsessed with Nazism, who shot herself as war was declared. Nancy, the merciless tease turned brilliant, subversive novelist Diana, the most beautiful woman of her generation, reviled for her abandonment of her gilded marriage and hated and imprisoned for her love of Oswald Mosely rebellious Decca, who eloped at nineteen to the Spanish Civil War with Churchill's communist nephew and went on to become a ground-breaking civil rights campaigner sweet Debo who became Duchess of Devonshire and chatelaine of Chatsworth even feminine, domesticated Pamela, known as 'Woman', was enough of a Mitford to have John Betjman at her feet and her Raeburn stove painted blue to match her eyes. The girls' lives were the stuff of headlines. The Mitfords' unconventional childhood and adolescence, growing up in a rambling country manor, deprived of formal education and at the mercy of their father's titanic rages and obsessions, has long been immortalised in Nancy's masterly comedies of aristocratic manners, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. But Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Decca and Debo, were, and are, far from ordinary. Even if the six daughters, born between 19, of the charming, eccentric David, Lord Redesdale, and his wife Sydney had been quite ordinary women, the span of their lives - encompassing the most traumatic century in Britain's history - and the status to which they were born, would have made their story a fascinating one.

The Riviera Set by Mary S. Lovell