The Mitfords in pictures: parties, politics and the real Pursuit of Love
Meet the stranger-than-fiction family behind the BBC drama, who kept horses on the staircase and Nazis in the closet
17 May 2021 • 6:57am
When The Pursuit of Love came out in 1945, Evelyn Waugh noted in his diary: “Nancy has written a novel full of exquisite detail of Mitford family life”. Nancy Mitford never found a muse to match her own family. Even later, when she came to write historical biography, starting with her acclaimed Madame de Pompadour, she couldn’t help turning it into a breed of memoir: “I do love it... They were all exactly like ONE,” she wrote in a letter.