How Unity Mitford seduced Hitler

The Daily Mail has got a world exclusive on its hands. In great excitement it is publishing the secret diary of Unity Valkyrie Mitford, the star-struck young aristo who made a splash in the 1930s tabloids with her pursuit of her famous love interest. The thing was that the star she was struck with was Adolf Hitler.

Unity was the scion of a posho family famous for its literary accomplishments and political extremism: she was one of the six daughters of David Freeman-Mitford, Lord Redesdale, a dim peer immortalised in the novels of the eldest daughter, Nancy, as ‘Uncle Matthew’. Known to his offspring as ‘Farve’, Redesdale was a reactionary imbecile best remembered for his withering judgements of practically everything and everybody: foreigners were ‘fiends’, abroad was ‘bloody’ and his own family were beneath contempt.

The Mitfords owe their niche in English social history to their eccentricity, their twee pet names for each other, and the fact that the six sisters (there was also one fascist-sympathising brother, Tom, who ironically was killed in the war fighting fascism) were good-looking in a flat-faced, china-blue-eyed kind of way.