Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper first met in 1932. He was twenty-eight, the author of two successful and outrageous novels, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. In the three years since he had separated from his first wife and been converted to the Roman Catholic Church, he had traveled and drifted about with no fixed abode, written a good bit of popular journalism, and played to the hilt the role of fashionable young novelist.

Lady Diana Cooper was more than ten years his senior, and already something of a legend. The youngest daughter of the eighth Duke of Rutland (though many, including Diana herself, believed her natural father to be the poet and editor Harry Cust), she had as a young girl been at the center of the inner circle of the Lost Generation, loved by such promising luminaries as Raymond Asquith, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Edward Horner, and other young men who were to lose their lives in the First World War. In 1919 she had married Duff Cooper, an impecunious Foreign Office clerk, one of the very few survivors of their prewar coterie. Theirs was a love match, hardly a partiin the eyes of the Rutlands. But Duff Cooper’s talents justified Diana’s faith, for he rose in the Conservative Party to become Secretary of State for War and First Lord of the Admiralty, from which post he resigned with great honor during the Munich crisis. In Churchill’s wartime government he acted as British Representative to the