More on Decca

Amy Mathieson at the Scotsman on Peter Sussman's edition of Jessica Mitford's letters. I can't wait to read these!

Coincidentally I got a funny end-of-semester present from one of the older students who's been sitting in on my lecture course, three books bound up in a parcel with a newspaper clipping or two (it is slightly frightening to consider the prospect of how much we reveal of ourselves over the course of a semester of lecturing, these books were all exceptionally well-suited to my tastes): a delightful-looking little book by Phyllis Eleanor Sandeman called Treasure on Earth: A Country House Christmas (sample sentences: "The 'Room' smelt of beer and coco-nut matting, the still-room of hot cakes and scones, the school room was a blend of Mike, Lady, ink and Fraulein's cough drops. Her father's study smelt of tobacco, Harris tweed and Russian leather; her mother's boudoir of violets and sealing-wax"); Nancy Mitford's Noblesse Oblige: An enquiry into the identifiable characteristics of the English aristocracy (sample sentence, from an essay by "Strix" on "Posh Lingo": "As in the eighteenth century, U-conversation is larded with vehement and extreme adjectives (ghastly, frightful, disastrous, nauseating), but they are no more intended to be taken au pied de la lettre than the unprintable epithets so freely used by soldiers"); and the 1951 edition of Webster's Dictionary of Synonyms.