Is there anything left to say about Evelyn Waugh? Since his death in 1966 at the age of 62, a veritable industry has grown up around the great satirist. A somewhat cloying but immensely popular television miniseries of his novel Brideshead Revisited got the ball rolling in the early 1980s. Practically all his work has been reissued, and several biographies have been undertaken – – I can think of three off the top of my head, two fulllength jobs in the last few years alone. An 800-page selection from his diaries appeared in 1976, 650 pages of letters came out in 1980, and a fat collection of his reviews and essays in 1984. The biographer Humphrey Carpenter even wrote a book called The Brideshead Generation, thus elevating Waugh to totemic status.

The novelist and biographer Nancy Mitford has not enjoyed anything like the attention lavished on her friend. But she, too, has become something of a cottage industry. In 1985, twelve years after her death, Jonathan Guinness’s The House of Mitford appeared, a “family portrait” detailing the exploits of Mitford’s parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale, their son, and their six beautiful and — in three cases, anyway — notorious daughters.