Editing Nancy Mitford (section)

===Biographical works===
The gift for vivid characterisation, which Mitford developed in her fiction, was used to full effect in her four biographical works. In the first of these, ''Madame de Pompadour'', she followed Waugh's advice not to write for experts but to fashion "a popular life like Strachey's ''Queen Victoria''", with "plenty of period prettiness".<ref>Amory (ed.), p. 393.</ref> This remained her yardstick in her subsequent biographical writings. Her own description of ''Voltaire in Love'' is "a Kinsey report of his romps with Mme de Châtelet and her romps with Saint-Lambert and his romps with Mme de Boufflers&nbsp;... I could go on for pages".<ref>Mosley (ed.), p. 412.</ref> Acton thought ''The Sun King'' the most entertaining introduction to the subject in the English language. Mitford's informal style was remarked on by the literary critic [[Cyril Connolly]], who wrote that her facility for transforming unpromising source material into readable form was a skill that any professional historian might envy.<ref>Acton, p. 167.</ref> The historian [[Antonia Fraser]] considered Mitford an important contributor to the "remorseless process by which historical and biographical sales have soared since 1950".<ref>{{harvnb|Thompson|2003|p=413}}</ref>