Summary
Grace Dent nominates Nancy Mitford for her wit, and for the way in which she showed women that it was possible to live your life fully and unconventionally.
Nancy Mitford's greatest success came with the novels The Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold Climate (1949).
Matthew Parris asks what else it is about Nancy that so inspires Grace, with the aid of Mitford biographer Lisa Hilton.
Grace Dent is a TV and restaurant critic, newspaper columnist, author, and broadcaster.
Producer Beth O'Dea
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2013.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the |
| 0:03.8 | podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC. |
| 0:08.6 | It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world. |
| 0:15.0 | What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism |
| 0:20.0 | and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines. |
| 0:23.7 | And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject |
| 0:28.3 | you might not even have thought you were interested in. |
| 0:30.2 | Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment, |
| 0:36.1 | you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:39.8 | Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear. |
| 0:46.0 | My guest today on Great Lives is the journalist Grace Dent. Grace, tell us whom you've chosen |
| 0:52.0 | and why. |
| 0:53.0 | I chose the author Nancy Mitford. |
| 0:56.2 | I chose her because as a character she's fascinating and, |
| 1:00.0 | you know, whenever I think of her she presents to me a way of being as a woman that I empathise with and I don't |
| 1:06.8 | necessarily see every day in everyday celebrities. She's a tremendous wit and a tremendous tease and tremendously wicked. |
| 1:15.0 | But you couldn't possibly come from a more different place than her. |
| 1:20.0 | What are you insinuated? |
| 1:22.0 | Well, I mean I think that that was what kind of put me off her books for so long |
| 1:28.1 | is that I thought that it was going to be this kind of whimsical snobbery that I would hate and what I actually found was this massive |
| 1:34.6 | command of language and wickedness and attention to detail and and also this |
| 1:39.3 | wonderful glamorous woman that you know I'm sort of obsessed with. |
... |
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