Author(s): Diana Cooper; John Julius Norwich (ed.)

Literary

'Please, darling monster, write as often as you can. It's so sad waiting for letters that don't come and are not even written. I love my darling boy. Don't treat me so badly again or I'll have your lights and liver when I get home.' 19 November 1939 Lady Diana Cooper was an aristocrat, society darling, an actress of stage and early screen. When she married the politician Duff Cooper, they became the golden couple who knew everyone who was anyone; they sat at the very heart of British public life. Here are her letters to her only son, John Julius Norwich, covering the period 1939 to 1952, taking us from the Blitz to post-Liberation Paris, via a Sussex smallholding, the Far East just before Pearl Harbor and a spell with the Free French in Algiers. As a portrait of a time and some of history's most dramatic and important events, 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. "I wish, I wish it was all over - Hitler defeated, the lights up again and the guns still". (2 October 1940). "Yesterday was a gallop of spirits and people and sun and fun". (26 September 1948). "I do my best but I'll always be a bum". (12 October 1948).