The Langhorne Sisters by James Fox Granta 546pp, £20 in UK
James Fox opens this epic account of his mother's family with a scene at Nancy Astor's luncheon table the summer he was eight.
Having offended once by arriving late, he was detected by great-aunt Nancy secreting his slice of grouse into his napkin. She launched one of her "sudden, wheeling attacks", volleying abuse at him in front of the hushed guests until he eventually fainted, dead bird with gravy huddled in his lap.
It's a fitting start to all that follows, pitching the reader straight into the long and intimate war of family life, without explanation: no foreword, no introduction, and no postscript. Fox has chosen to tell all, and he assumes we know why these particular tantrums, rows, reconciliations, sorrows and scandals are significant.
And, of course, we do. Fox's grandmother and her sisters were on crony footing with an impressive range of celebrities in the first half of the 20th century, while Nancy played a role of some significance in Britain's political history. Fortunately for the author, they were also dedicated correspondents, and kept their letters.
Collated with anecdotes and recollections, these were rich resources to draw on and Fox, formerly a journalist with the Sunday Times and Observer and author of the account of Lord Erroll's murder in Kenya, White Mischief, is an expert weaver of narrative. The result is a book that literary and political gossip junkies will find it hard to resist.
They might also find it hard to avoid reading it without musing on the arbitrary nature of fame, for despite the many tributes to their charm, wit and beauty from illustrious men, there is little in this book to suggest that the sisters were other than fairly ordinary girls. They bickered, fought and made up, analysed each other and everyone around them endlessly, giggled, played pranks and shared romantic hopes.
How did they evolve into such exotic creatures ? Enter the usual culprit: the media. It was the society pages of the American press at the turn of the century that glamuorised the Langhorne girls of Virginia as exciting, high-spirited beauties.
It's easy to see why. As well as the old colonial home in Virginia and the balls and debutante seasons, they had a colourfully irascible father, Chillie Langhorne, who made his money collaborating with Yankees, and a saintly mother, Nanaire.
Their girlhoods were peopled to the point of caricature with gentlemen callers and beaux whose marriage proposals were collected like dance cards - Irene, the unassailable champion, had sixty-two before she accepted Charles Dana Gibson, a famous and talented graphic artist best-known for the "Gibson Girl", the icon of strong, sporty-but-sexy young American womanhood. Popular myth holds that Irene was the model. The reality was more along the lines of life imitating art. Gibson created the "Girl" long before he met Irene, who then became his exclusive model, the incarnation of his vision.
Given all this, the sisters understandably acquired almost mythic status as the kind of ante-bellum Southern belles whom fiction subsequently brought to life. Indeed, they even spanned the appropriate generation between Scarlet O'Hara and Daisy Buchanan: the eldest, Lizzie, was born in 1867 into a South devastated by the Civil War, and the youngest, Nora, was rumoured to be the model for a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, with whom she was also rumoured to have had an affair.
With the exception of Lizzie, who remained the definitive poor and bitter relation all her life, they confidently swept into position at centre stage in the events of the day, socialising with important people, doing rather ostentatious "good works" when the opportunity arose, claiming an entitlement to lives of prestige and privilege.
Irene perhaps fared best. She remained cheerfully vain to old age, a slightly ridiculous figure whom Fox compares to Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers film; but she had a long and contented marriage and a respected record of charitable service. Phyliss, Fox's grandmother, had a melancholy nature and a troubled love life, and Nora's story is a black-sheep's chronicle of recklessness and disaster, peppered by high jinks and merry japes.
There remains Nancy, the inevitable centre of the narrative, for it was her powerful position in England from the 1920s to the 1940s that made the legend a reality. Fox adds new detail to the mystique of the first woman MP, notoriously volatile, eccentric, irrational, and yet surrounded by devoted men who held views diametrically opposed to her own, G.B. Shaw and Sean O'Casey among them.
But his most valuable contribution has been to put fresh perspective on that period from the Boer War to the second World War when political policy was shaped at Nancy and Waldorf Astor's country estate, Cliveden. It was here that Nancy first created her salon, gathering the great names in English literature for long weekends.
Gradually, she replaced them with Lord Milner's "kindergarten", the bright young Oxford graduates who forged the Union of South Africa. The Tory Party didn't have back-room boys, they had what Claude Cockburn called "the Cliveden set", a term that became internationally synonymous with a policy of appeasement toward Hitler.
Fox argues persuasively that this was unfair, not even what Cockburn intended; that Nancy and her husband were never pro-appeasement, that the brightest and best of the Conservatives of the era were sharply divided on policy toward Germany.
This is engrossing, all the more entertaining for the counterpoint of family exchanges and entanglements. Fox has achieved something remarkable, a book with all the immediacy of a personal memoir and the satisfaction of historical perspective.