Darling: A razor-sharp, gloriously funny retelling of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love

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Darling is a modern re-telling of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, and anyone familiar with that book will recognise the clever updating of the people, places and societal nuances of the original. She was determined to escape the ordinariness of life, so she went to Paris, met some eccentric people, married some of them, and lived her life to the fullest.

These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. I could never square Uncle Matthew with his past life, and Linda’s final husband is too good to be true. Darling belongs in the pantheon of books that feel a bit like opening up a doll’s house to show the impeccable precision of the world within. The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Linda’s life is charted from early adolescence, and takes in her loves and losses, successes and failures.Uncle Matthew is now a retired rock-star who wants to protect his children from the tabloids; Lord Merlin, the effete neighbour in Mitford’s original, becomes fashion wunderkind Merlin Berners (a nod to Lord Berners, who inspired the character); Davey, obsessed with his health, fits seamlessly into the modern world: “‘I have a lot of time for the late Dr Mayr’s method. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit.

As crazy as things get, there are poignant moments scattered throughout which remind us that love is sometimes not what we imagined, but it can also come when we least expect it.Inevitably, Linda eventually rebels against her sheltered childhood, running away to London to be a model and then jumping into a duo of ill-fated marriages, which is Knight’s cue to skewer certain quarters of the British ruling class. But there’s no getting round it: being separated from your lover because they must open a new hotel in New Zealand is fundamentally less sexy than them leaving to fight the Nazis as a French resistance hero.