The Light of Common Day

The second volume of Lady Diana Cooper’[s memoirs covers her life from 1923 to the outbreak of war in 1939. During those years she became a famous English personality, as a woman of prodigious beauty, as a remarkable actress and as the unconventional wife of a British statesman. * Spectator *Lady Diana was no ordinary upper-class English rose: She was perhaps the first person from such a background to go on the stage, wowing audiences on both sides of the Atlantic * Washington Times *She wrote three volumes of autobiography…books which are likely to hold their interest for a long time to come * The Times *Admired and adored as a classic beauty and first-division socialite during the frivolous Twenties and Thirties, Lady Diana was one of the last survivors of the set which revolved around the Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson * The Times *One of the glittering social personalities of an era of wealth and privilege, combining as she did exceptional grace and beauty with verve and a nature of deep and intense feeling * The Times *A chronicle of people and events written with her particular brio and with her especial blend of the comic and the compassionate, and it is, too, a story of loyalties. Impulsive, natural, amusing, revealing and never for an instant pedestrian * Sphere magazine *

Lady Diana Cooper was born on 29 August 1892. She married Alfred Duff Cooper, DSO, who became one of the Second World War’s key politicians. Her startling beauty resulted in her playing the lead in two silent films and then Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle. In 1944, following the Liberation of Paris, the couple moved into the British Embassy in Paris. They then retired to a house at Chantilly just outside Paris. After Duff’s death in 1954 Diana remained there till 1960, when she moved back to London. She died in 1986.

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