Letters with a stamp of genious

DEAR LUMPY BY ROGER MORTIMER AND LOUISE MORTIMER (Constable £12.99)

Dear Lupin, a collection of letters from exasperated father Roger Mortimer to his feckless son, ‘Lupin’,  was the word-of-mouth bestseller of last year and this second volume of letters to his daughter, ‘Lumpy’,  deserves equal success.
Although the tone this time is gentle, rather than scolding, the same eccentric humour and affectionate teasing underpins the rollicking tales of rural dinner parties and irritating guests, the descriptions of Roger’s wife’s appalling driving, her obsession with hunting and fondness for a tipple and the precarious health of the various family pets.  The letters begin when Lumpy is sent to boarding school aged twelve and continue until her father’s death - a wonderful record of paternal love.

LOVE, NINA BY NINA STIBBE (Viking £12.99)

When Nina Stibbe moved from her home in Leicester at the age of twenty to become a nanny for Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of The London Review of Books, her eyes were opened to the rarified literary world of Gloucester Crescent, Camden, where regular guests and neighbours included Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin. 
Fortunately for us, she was less than impressed with the glittering names and wrote regular letters home to her sister, relaying with a seemingly-innocent eye for detail how Bennett was a dab hand at repairing bikes and washing machines.
The chaotic household where she cared for the two young boys is conjured up with an equally subversive spirit as she cheerfully chats about literary giants Dickens and Hardy in the same breath as Enid Blyton. An unaffected delight.

TO THE LETTER BY SIMON GARFIELD (Canongate £16.99)

As Simon Garfield notes, we have no idea where an email goes when we press send: ‘in the end, it’s just another vanishing’. And although in theory all emails are preserved for ever, will future historians have the energy to sift through the numberless zillions of them (300 billion are sent every day) to discover lines as extraordinary as this, preserved in a letter written from a Greek husband working away from home to his pregnant wife in the first century BC? ‘As soon as I receive my pay I will send it up to you. If by any chance you give birth and it is male, let it live; if it is female, get rid of it.’
Running throughout this delightful book are the letters between a British WW2 soldier and his sweetheart: ‘My hands, my lips are very conscious of their idleness. I love you, Chris.’ This book is itself a love letter to a form of communication that will soon be lost forever. 

DARLING MONSTER BY DIANA COOPER (Chatto £25)

A devoted mother separated from her son by the long years of World War II, boarding school and her husband Duff’s postings abroad, Diana Cooper made up for the oceans between them by writing adoringly to her son, John Julius Norwich, almost every day.
From a bolthole at the Dorchester during the Blitz, where Diana and Duff dined in full evening dress as the bombs rained down around them (‘Incendiaries [on the roof] don’t count if there is someone there to bury them in sand’) to the sparkling post-war party years in Paris where Duff was Ambassador, her charming, funny, gossipy letters are a vivid, perfect portrait of a charmed class, as well as a testament to a mother’s touching love for her son.

THE LETTERS OF JOHN F KENNEDY EDITED BY MARTIN W SANDLER (Bloomsbury £20)

The 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination may have passed but interest in the man and his brief spell as the most powerful politician in the world lingers on.
This collection of letters written to and received from Kennedy reveals his closeness to his own parents as a young man and his growth in political stature as he develops an intense correspondence with both Martin Luther King and Nikita Krushchev, reflecting his twin priorities of his civil rights and nuclear war. 
His gentle touch with children who write in: ‘My sister, Lulu, aged 6…thinks your brother Bobby is better looking.’, provokes the response: ‘My brother Robert will be happy to know he has an admirer …I have passed your letter to him’. 
A valuable resource and insight into a pivotal time in American and world history.

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