The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

I read The Pursuit of Love as a child, mystified and delighted by the spirited Radletts and their terrifying father, and have returned to it at least once a year ever since. It is a darker book than I first realised, the superficial lightness concealing a faint and beguiling pessimism about love's pursuit and its consequences. Linda Radlett, the intensely English heroine, is the most beautiful of an eccentric aristocratic family closely modelled on Nancy Mitford's own. The children spend most of their days tucked up in the airing cupboard – the only warm place in their vast house – learning the rudiments of sex from Ducks and Duck Breeding and squabbling over the exact nature of Oscar Wilde's crimes. Lord Alconleigh doesn't approve of educating women – or of foreigners, intellectuals and other sundry "sewers" – while fraternising with the opposite sex is limited to hunt meets and rural dances. Linda bolts into a serious of wildly unsuitable liaisons before falling at last for the endearingly wicked Fabrice, a French duke. The story's genius lies in its wicked humour, which remains relentlessly uplifting even as the Blitz begin to smash all the hopes of that pre-war arcadia. Not everyone will warm to Mitford's bright, brittle tone: she prefers the bon mot to the bleeding heart and Linda's abandoned child gets short shrift. With the advent of war her acute ability to poke fun achieves a kind of perfection. The lacerating ironies of the very posh have never seemed so life affirming.