The Pursuit of Love: Not just for girls

After a lacklustre year of books programming, the low point being a serialisation of a middle-class family’s failed attempt to live without internet, Radio 4 has lately come into its own. Already this month we’ve been treated to Beware of Pity (which I wrote about here), the surprisingly enjoyable Gargantua and Pantagruel, Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens and Craig Taylor’s Londoners. This week it’s a Timberlake Wertenbaker adaptation of Possession and an early Christmas present, The Pusuit of Love by Nancy Mitford.

Many of us will have a comfort book, something we return to in times of illness, romantic strife, double dip recession and so on. Mine would have to be The Pursuit of Love, although I feel guilty calling it a comfort book, because it is so much more than that. I feel just as guilty admitting it makes me laugh and cry every time I read it, because – as well as sounding trite – this somehow undermines its intellectual credibility, already lower than it should be.