What can it have been like to have been Lady Diana Cooper, "the most beautiful girl in the world", "the only really glamorous woman in the world", the most celebrated debutante of her era, the daughter of a duke, the wife of a famous diplomat (and so the British ambassadress to Paris), an internationally acclaimed actress, a character in at least half a dozen novels (by writers as unalike as Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Arnold Bennett, D.H. Lawrence and Enid Bagnold), a dedicated to wounded and dying soldiers in World War I, and a pig farmer?
It's a question we can answer, given the vast literature about her, beginning with her enchanting three volumes of memoirs, and including biographies of both her and her husband, Duff Cooper; his much-admired memoirs, as well as his uninhibited (to say the least) diaries; an ample collection of their mostly rapturous letters to each other; an ample collection of her correspondence with Waugh; the letters of her dearest friend, Conrad Russell; and the frank autobiography of her son, the historian John Julius Norwich. And now we have a volume of her letters to that son. It's called Darling Monster, although there's nothing monstrous about her beloved John Julius, and there's nothing monstrous in her passionate but practical attachment to him. The apparent stability of their relationship suggests that she was as good a mother as she was a society figure, nurse, actress, wife, writer, hostess, ambassadress, farmer and perhaps most of all, friend.