Nancy Mitford

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Abridged Edition

Penguin Readers Level 5: The Pursuit of Love (ELT Graded Reader)

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast drama collection

Nancy Mitford: Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate & More

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Love in a Cold Climate & The Pursuit of Love

Highland Fling

Pigeon Pie

Now a major series on BBC and Prime Video directed by Emily Mortimer and starring Lily James and Andrew Scott

The Pursuit of Love

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With Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh

Christmas Pudding

The wickedly funny sequel to The Pursuit of Love

Love in a Cold Climate

The Blessing

Don't Tell Alfred

The Complete Novels

Wigs on the Green

The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

The Sun King

Voltaire in Love

Frederick the Great

Madame de Pompadour

My favourite biography is Nancy Mitford's Madame de Pompadour - a famous 18th-century French beauty who became Louis XV's mistress. The secret of a good biography is not just to tell the person's story but to create the world in which they lived.

Mitford brings warmth to everything she touches, and her biography of Madame de Pompadour is testimony to that

Reads as if an enchantingly clever woman was pouring out the story to me on the telephone

Nancy Mitford excels in depicting both the brilliant romantic showcase and the recessed world of power... No historian writing in English has given a better pen-picture of Versailles in its heyday

Incontestably her best book, Madame de Pompadour is beautifully written in a rapid, nervous, gay and enthusiastic manner which carries the reader through from first page to last

When Jeanne-Antoinette was nine, she was told by a fortune teller that she would one day become the mistress of the handsome young Louix XV - from that day she was groomed to become 'a morsel fit for a King'. Nancy Mitford lovingly tells the story of how the little girl rose, against a backdrop of savage social-climbing, intrigue, excess and high drama, to become the most powerful women of the eighteenth century French court, Le Pompadour.

An eclectic, affectionate biography of Louis XV's most famous and enduring mistress

Nancy Mitford was born in London on November 28 1904, daughter of the second Baron Redesdale, and the eldest of six girls. Her sisters included Lady Diana Mosley; Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire and Jessica, who immortalised the Mitford family in her autobiography Hons and Rebels. The Mitford sisters came of age during the Roaring Twenties and wartime in London, and were well known for their beauty, upper-class bohemianism or political allegiances. Nancy contributed columns to The Lady and the Sunday Times, as well as writing a series of popular novels including The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, which detailed the high-society affairs of the six Radlett sisters. While working in London during the Blitz, Nancy met and fell in love with Gaston Palewski, General de Gaulle's chief of staff, and eventually moved to Paris to be near him. In the 1950s she began writing historical biographies - her life of Louis XIV, The Sun King, became an international bestseller. Nancy completed her last book, Frederick the Great, before she died of Hodgkin's disease on 30 June 1973.

Madame de Pompadour

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