Volume 24, Number 8 · May 12, 1977
Hons and Huns
By Noel Annan
Unity Mitford: An Enquiry into Her Life and the Frivolity of Evil
by David Pryce-Jones
Dial, 292 pp., $9.95
Unity Mitford was the fourth of the six remarkable Mitford sisters. The eldest, Nancy, who immortalized her parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale, in The Pursuit of Love, married the original of Evelyn Waugh's character Basil Seal. The youngest married the present Duke of Devonshire. The third, Diana, married the leader of the British Fascist movement, Sir Oswald Mosley, was imprisoned with him during the war for three years as a security risk, released by Churchill when the threat of the invasion of Britain had clearly passed, and has just written a vivacious memoir entirely unrepentant and complaining of being uncomfortable in prison. Jessica ('Decca') is the best known in America for her books on morticians and prisons: now married to the labor lawyer Bob Treuhaft, she first ran off with Churchill's nephew, Esmond Romilly, to fight on the Spanish Republican side in the civil war.
Review, 3662 words
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