Don't Tell Alfred

Nancy Mitford. With a dust jacket design by Cecil Beaton.

Hamish Hamilton. London. 1960. First edition. Hardback, octavo; green cloth-bound boards, dust jacket. 248 pages. English. 190 x 130mm. 0.35kg. . Very good, in very good dust jacket; light shelf wear to jacket, slight wear to top forecorners and head of spine neatly repaired with tape to verso, light toning to spine, price-clipped; light offsetting to front endpaper, slight dustiness and spotting to top edge, no inscriptions.

A first edition of Don't Tell Alfred, the final book in Nancy Mitford's trilogy of novels narrated by Fanny Wincham (nee Logan). The story is based twenty years after The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. Fanny finds herself in Paris after her husband Alfred is appointed the British Ambassador. Uncle Matthew, the Bolter and Hecktor Dexter return and are joined by a new cast of Parisian characters and Fanny's children, the four of whom place the plot firmly in the 1950s -  'Basil, a teddy boy who runs a tourist agency, is soon followed by his bearded brother David, a Zen Buddhist with a speechless wife and an adopted Chinese baby. Meanwhile the two youngest brothers run away from Eton and take jobs as publicity agents to Yanky Fonzy, the disc star.'  Cecil Beaton provided the dust jacket, depicting teddy boy Basil in an impressive enfilade.