The Mitford sisters: Kardashians of the 1930s still fascinate

Interest in the Mitford sisters rises and falls with great regularity: eight years on from Gucci's much-documented Never Marry a Mitford jumper, four years on from the BBC's adaptation of Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, a new TV show appears fortuitously to bring them back into the public consciousness again.

- Ella Risbridger

Here they come, out of the mists of time, the seven children of a minor member of the House of Lords: Nancy, of course, the author of Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love and probably the most famous in her own right; followed by Pamela, the least famous and fond chiefly of chickens and horrible men; then Tom, the only boy, with a weakness for Nazis and, as far as history is concerned, no personality.

Then Diana, Mrs Oswald Mosley. Then Unity Valkyrie, conceived in the little Canadian town of Swastika and led presumably by nominative determinism to Hitler's side; and her best friend and closest sibling, Jessica (Decca), an ardent communist from childhood. Their shared room, famously, had a line down the centre: swastikas and eagles all the way one way, and hammers and sickles down the other. The baby of the family, Debo, loved horses and dogs and looking pretty, and became a duchess.

A big, splashy new period drama, Outrageous, on TV next week, starring Anna Chancellor and James Purefoy, is just the latest flowering of Mitford mania.