“She loathed people who were anti-Semitic and she loathed people who were anti-gay. “She has been accused of anti-Semitism but many of her close friends were Jewish,” says Hilton. She mocked both in her 1935 novel Wigs on the Green and wrote a letter to a friend saying she wanted to invent “a sham arm which can be screwed on & which makes a noise like Hitler making a speech” to give to Unity and Diana.īiographer Lisa Hilton, author of The Horror of Love: Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski in Paris and London, is convinced that Nancy’s experiences of working in a refugee camp during the Spanish Civil War, and later helping Jewish refugees in London during the Second World War, changed her outlook.

Nancy briefly flirted with right-wing views, praising Mosley’s Black Shirts, before turning her back on extremism – and on the beliefs of her two sisters.

Hitler had been guest of honour at the wedding of Nancy’s sister Diana, when the socialite married the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, at the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, in October 1936. She lived out her final years on the Scottish island of Inch, dying in 1948. She made a hash of it and was left with brain damage from the bullet lodged in her brain. On the day war was declared, Unity tried to shoot herself in a Munich park. She ended up befriending Hitler, who used to stroke her hair and call her his “Little Kind”. She once etched a swastika into a window using a diamond ring. Unity became a fervent Nazi groupie, declaring publicly that, “I want everyone to know I’m a Jew hater”.

In real life, Redesdale passed on his hateful views to several of his daughters. In 1937, he joined the pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic organisation The Link. Nancy’s father developed extreme right-wing opinions when she was a teenager, following financial problems brought on by a series of poor investments.

Prime Suspect writer Lynda La Plante: ‘Line of Duty and Unforgotten? I find them preposterous’.

Maggie Shipstead: ‘In fiction, you can “get at” attractions that don’t fit the mould of appropriateness’.

Books of the month: From Rachel Cusk’s Second Place to Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts.

The pursuit of love mitford