Autobiography

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Lady Diana Cooper's autobiography covers the years from her earliest childhood (as Lady Diana Manners, youngest daughter of the eighth Duke of Rutland) to retirement at Chantilly and the death of her husband Duff Cooper, first Viscount Norwich, politician, writer and, at the end of the Second World War, British Ambassador in Paris. The three books which make up this single volume were published in 1958-60 and met with outstanding critical and public success. Reviewing the first of them, Evelyn Waugh wrote: 'This is not to be judged merely as the memoirs of an exceptionally brilliant social figure, but as a work of art. By that standard it has real distinction - poetic, idiosyncratic, poignant, funny, unflagging, scintillating, simple, stylish; not the book of the season, or of the bedside table; a book for the library, to be read and reread and loved for a lifetime'.