The compelling love story of two extraordinary individuals - Nancy Mitford and Free French commander Gaston Palewski - living in extraordinary times - immortalised in THE PURSUIT OF LOVE
'A delicious mix of drama, melancholy and enchantment' DAILY EXPRESS
This is an account of Nancy Mitford's only real love affair and its title is taken from an exclamation she made to her sister Diana Mosley... it is a story with
a delicious mix of drama, melancholy and enchantmentHilton's style is positively edible
Nancy Mitford was elegant, clever, witty and exceptionally beady-eyed about the world. So why did she have such awful taste in men? This is the subject of the historian Lisa Hilton's
entertainingly caustic The Horror of Love... Her book is not just a crisply written account of their relationship but also something of a manifesto for a more pragmantic, Gallic approach to human relations
A biography of the love affair between Nancy Mitford and the Free French commander who inspired her to write her most famous novel, THE PURSUIT OF LOVE. Drawing on unpublished correspondence, this is a sympathetic and cautionary tale about falling for a philanderer
This biography of Nancy Mitford's tumultuous post-war love affair with Gaston Palewski (immortalised in
The Pursuit of Love as Fabrice de Sauveterre) paints a portrait of a relationship as agonising as it was intense, sweeping the reader up with conspiratorial ease
Nancy Mitford was an English novelist with a glamour that surpassed even that of her aristocratic sisters. Her lover, Gaston Palewski, was a French politician who featured in disguised form in two of her novels. Their relationship became a tragedy.
Mitford fans will love this book, of course, though it says so much more about the compromises and tragedies of love
Well paced and informative
Nancy Mitofrd, aristocrat, author, waspish wit, first laid eyes on Gaston Palewski in 1942 and, for her, it was love at first sight that lasted a lifetime... but the great tragedy of Nancy's life was that to him, she was never "the one"... a compelling account of the 1944 liberation of France and the country's struggle to confront the collaboration...
there is so much charm and drama to Nancy and Gaston's lives, embroiled as they were in the key events of the 20th-centuryThe charm of THE HORROR OF LOVE is its
bringing to life the worlds of Nancy Mitford's novels. Its portrait of upper-class postwar Paris, Palewski's femmes du monde extravagantly garbed in Dior's New Look, Mitford and Palewski's shared love of history, paintings and antiques, the glittering parties in splendid houses and the regular recurrence of the Duchess of Devonshire, will surely appeal to Mitford fans, in this book which delights in the more picturesque aspects of its subject.
Nancy Mitford - novelist, socialite, most gifted of the famous sisters - pursued a one-sided 30-year affair with French Resistance hero turned diplomat and minister, Gaston Palewski.
Hilton's book brings a sharp historian's eye to glittering Paris and London backdrops as this impossible romance unfoldsAn excellent study of passion.
Hilton has no truck with those who claim that Nancy died of a broken heart; her crisply written book is instead something of a manifesto for a more pragmatic, Gallic approach to human relations.
An extraordinary, yet also typical, love affair told with sympathy and intelligence.
Not a "Mitford book", says Hilton, but this nicely barbed reappraisal of Nancy's 30-year affair with politician and unlikely philanderer Palewski extrapolates heavily from her world and writings.
For those who like the work and life of Nancy Mitford this will also be a most useful and entertaining biography.
Makes for fascinating reading.
It is true passion that this volume focuses on.
Delectable
Lisa Hilton is the acclaimed author of The Real Queen of France: Athénais and Louis XIV, Mistress Peachum's Pleasure, Queens Consort: England's Medieval Queens and The Horror of Love. She is the author of two novels, the bestselling Wolves in Winter and The House with Blue Shutters, which was shortlisted in the UK for the Commonwealth Fiction prize. She was educated at Oxford University, and lives in central London.
http://lisa-hilton.com/