Darling Monster

Resumen del libro

Lady Diana Cooper, considered the most beautiful woman of the century, was an aristocrat, a socialite, an actress of stage and early screen. She married rising political star Duff Cooper, who then very publicly resigned over Chamberlain's appeasement policies in 1938. In Churchill's cabinet, he ran the controversial Ministry of Information. This golden couple knew everyone who was anyone and sat at the very heart of Britain's public life. Diana's letters to her only son, John Julius Norwich, cover the period 1939 to 1952. They take us from the rumblings of war, through the Blitz, which the Coopers spent holed up in the Dorchester (because it was newer, and therefore less vulnerable, than the Ritz), to the Sussex countryside where we see Diana blissfully setting up a smallholding as part of the war effort. After a spell with the Free French in Algiers, Duff was appointed British Ambassador to France and the couple settled into the glorious embassy in post-Liberation Paris. And of course everyone who's everyone is here, often in affectionate and unguarded detail, from Diana's close friends Evelyn Waugh and the Mitfords to Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in Hollywood; from an off-duty Churchill to Roosevelt at the White House; from Edward and Wallis Simpson to the young princesses Margaret and Elizabeth. But over and beyond all the glitz are the daily details of Diana's life, from which she emerges as a highly intelligent, funny, fiercely loyal and immensely likeable woman. A woman who disliked extravagance, who was often cripplingly shy, who was happiest in the countryside with her cow and goats and whose greatest love and preoccupation were her husband and. As a portrait of a time, some of history's most important events and a high-profile woman, these letters are invaluable. But they also give us a timeless and sometimes unbearably touching portrait of the love between a mother and son, separated by war, oceans - and the constraints of the time they lived in.