Nancy Mitford’s novel The Pursuit of Love was inspired by her intense and agonising love affair with the Free French commander Gaston Palewski. Author and biographer Lisa Hilton tells the story of the relationship and of the extraordinary post-war times during which it was conducted. Hilton has written a number of biographical works and a novel, The House with Blue Shutters. Her second novel, Wolves in Winter, will be published in April.

‘Nancy Mitford was elegant, clever, witty and exceptionally beady-eyed about the world. So why did she have such awful taste in men? This is the subject of the historian Lisa Hilton’s entertainingly caustic The Horror of Love . . . Her book is not just a crisply written account of their relationship but also something of a manifesto for a more pragmatic, Gallic approach to human relations.’ Daisy Goodwin The Sunday Times