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‘This book is just about my favourite book of all time … I’m not entirely convinced I could like somebody who didn’t like this book … it’s funny and moving and gives you an insight into this extraordinary moment as the war is about to begin … it’s so vivid, and what’s more, it’s incredibly current’ Robert Rinder, BBC Radio 4

‘Wonderfully funny and very poignant’ Philip Toynbee

‘More than an extremely amusing autobiography … she has evoked a whole generation. Her book is full of the music of time’ SUNDAY TIMES

‘Whenever I read the words “Peer’s Daughter” in a headline,’ Lady Redesdale once sadly remarked, ‘I know it’s going to be something about one of you children.’ The Mitford family is one of the century’s most enigmatic, made notorious by Nancy’s novels, Diana’s marriage to Sir Oswald Mosley, Unity’s infatuation with Hitler, Debo’s marriage to a duke and Jessica’s passionate commitment to communism. Hons and Rebels is an enchanting and deeply absorbing memoir of an isolated and eccentric upbringing which conceals beneath its witty, light-hearted surface much wisdom and depth of feeling.

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Reviews

Christopher Hitchens, THE ATLANTIC
[An] uproarious yet deadly portrait of family life and family politics ... It evokes the atmosphere of the 1930s with more feeling than almost any other book of the period
SUNDAY TIMES
More than an extremely amusing autobiography ... she has evoked a whole generation. Her book is full of the music of time
Stella Duffy, A GOOD READ, BBC Radio 4
Her awareness of where she's from and what she had is astonishing ... to maintain that kind of awareness is astonishing, and she is very funny, but she also writes very well ... she mixes the hugely political, the very sweeping things, with intensely personal moments
Robert Rinder, A GOOD READ, BBC Radio 4
This book is just about my favourite book of all time ... I'm not entirely convinced I could like somebody who didn't like this book ... it's funny and moving and gives you an insight into this extraordinary moment as the war is about to begin ... it's so vivid, and what's more, it's incredibly current
Philip Toynbee
Wonderfully funny and very poignant
Siriol Hugh-Jones, TATLER
Stunning. Reads like an extravagantly mannered fiction, except that it is all fabulously true ... Miss Mitford is at once touching and wildly funny, and there is not one of highly coloured characters that is not violently alive and uncomfortably kicking
Harriett Gilbert, A GOOD READ, BBC Radio 4
What is really quite amazing about this book, which I have read many, many times, and love ... [is] she's not La Pasionaria, she's not some really left-wing heroine, but she is amazing to have got from where she started to where she ended up