Having read The Pursuit of Love (finished on the the bus on the way here [the Kaimuki library] this morning), I've begun Love in a Cold Climate (in the same volume); much bemused by the [usual, standard] critical assessments [which I always like to sample when I begin a famous book]of the former as "more sentimental, and less cynical" than the latter. Like I care: I'm waiting, with bated breath and barely restrained impatience [promising myself that I will not spoil the artful pacing of Ms. Mitford's exposition by skipping ahead], for the appearance of Cedric and his captivation of Aunt Sadie, who was played by the divine Vivian Pickles in the television version of LIACC--Lo! it must have been twenty-seven or more years ago.

I pause now to moot and puzzle over the friendship,evidently sincere, between Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. Could it be that EW had qualities that weren't vitiated by his appalling snobbery and heartless egotism? I dread having to go looking for them. Why may I not say with a civil enough leer that I loved The Loved One, without feeling in the least inclined to like its author, and certainly not at all disposed to plunge into the tortured toadyism of Brideshead Revisited (whose real-life "Sebastian," as I happen to know, despised the non-fictional Waugh every bit as much as I do, and for the same reasons)?