So nice and yet so Nazi

We are none of us, thank heaven, one-dimensional creatures easily and succinctly defined by a single characteristic. It is an obvious truth, yet was almost entirely ignored in the reporting of Diana Mosley’s death in Paris last summer, announced with the same clamour as had enveloped her for many of the last 70 years of her life. She was often vilified with a glee and enjoyment which carefully avoided any thought and latched on to the remorseless repetition of two simple facts, that she had been Hitler’s friend and Mosley’s wife. Ergo, she had to be detestable. To their great shame, even some serious historians were prepared to join in the ranting lest their political sense might appear to wobble.

This biography is more responsible. It celebrates the life of a remarkable woman without concealing the central huge misrouting which fate mapped out for her. I only wish it gave more space to her literary skills, for she was the most elegant writer in a family bursting with creative energy; her sister Nancy Mitford was funnier, her sister Jessica Mitford more robust, her sister Debo Devonshire more accessible, but Diana was the supreme exemplar of style. In this, her writing mirrored herself, for she had a perfect instinct for the harmonious and the serene. She and her surroundings were always enticingly beautiful.

She was famously brought up in a family which we would nowadays consider slightly eccentric, with a languid, detached mother, a volcanically irascible father, and a brother and sisters variously noisy and excitable. Diana, with her hunger for literature and chic society, needed to escape an atmosphere dominated by ‘chickens, ponies and turbulent sisters’ and, like many others, chose marriage as the obvious channel. Her first husband was Bryan Guinness, who comes across in this book as little less than a saint, uniquely tolerant and forgiving, happy and optimistic, and rather innocent, unsophisticated.