Series of eighteen autograph letters signed ("Nancy"), to her fellow novelist Anthony Powell and his wife Violet, the first letter thanking Powell for his kind remarks about Love in a Cold Climate ("...I am pleased you like the book – I've had a terrible drubbing in America ʻno message & no meaning' etc, I've had to stop reading them so bad for my inferiority feeling. Oh eloquent is dreadful I do agree I'll cope with it when I get back[.] Clichés pour from my pen & I do try to suppress them by degrees, but never get rid of them all!...") and relating an anecdote about their mutual friend Waugh ("...Diana met a Spaniard, great R.C., who said ʻdo you know Evelyn Waugh?'/ ʻOh yes very well. He's a Roman Catholic you know'/ ʻJust for a joke I suppose?'/ We screamed with laughter..."), whose death she laments in a later letter ("...I mind passionately about Evelyn I see that he is one of the people I have most loved in my life – perhaps one only realizes that when death intervenes. I shall always miss him. All these blows makes ones own end more supportable, there is that to be said..."); in other letters she thanks Powell for "Your lovely book" [A Question of Upbringing] ("...I'm here writing one & had to down tools until I'd finished yours. How I shrieked at it. Widmerpool!!...") and discussing possible French publishers for it; the impending appearance of his next novel [A Buyer's Market] ("...You are lucky to have finished a novel. I haven't got one single idea in my head & feel as if I never shall have another...") and the arrival of the book itself ("...Oh dear how I shrieked, & how it took me back to those terrible days when I adored mushrooms... The barrage of taxi doors shutting, the Beauty, the young man who went to all those parties & the deadly dowdiness of the whole thing so wonderfully implied. Of course my favourite incident was Widmerpool in the dungeon..."); she also provides pen portraits of Paris contemporaries ("...a bore of the most extraordinary pungency... Madame Vesmitch adored me & was terribly kind to me years ago when I was poor & liked mushrooms... when I had taken my shoes off & was about to fall into bed Marie Laure de Noailles arrived in full ball dress & we sat politely conversing by the buffet with the 4 waiters standing around. It was very odd... Do come back soon, you see how funny it all is...") and touches on her own work ("...I'm doing Pompadour – it is nervous work as I've never done a life before. And oh the horror of the French books having no index..."); in her letters to Violet, she discusses the advisability of using the word ʻtoilet' and is unstinting in her praise of Powell ("...What a G.O.M. Tony has become I am proud to know him. Books like the Music of Time keep ill people going..."); her last letter to Powell containing her well-known account of lunch with Cyril Connolly: "The luncheon with Cyril was like a farce I wonder if he told you. He did that thing which (& I'm sure Violet would agree) I simply hate, of bringing food. After all, one has ordered the luncheon for good or for bad & I think it extremely rude to provide the entrée. However I concealed my feelings (by the way it was plovers' eggs) & we each took one. They were raw & went all over everything. Then, greatly subdued, me boiling more than ever, we went down to the dinner where I had provided a bottle of Château Lafitte for Cyril... Cyril refused the wine which really threw me into a fatigue as this lovely stuff had to be consumed by me & the moon-faced major. The truth is Cyril is not sortable & I shall never ask him here again Evelyn was quite right about the boy"; fourteen letters to Powell, four to Lady Violet; two on postcards, three signed with initial; together with a letter by her sister Debo ("...It is so marvellous to know it is all over for Nancy. She had such a cruel illness, so long – so awful..."); plus two letters by her editor, Charlotte Mosley, thanking Powell for allowing her to make copies, over 30 pages, 4to and 8vo, Paris and elsewhere, 1949-1972