At around 4am, Jessica Mitford would be up, tap tap tapping at her typewriter, which had the kind of typeface forensic experts match up to anonymous letters in spy movies: you could recognise a fax from Decca from any single wonky character. Also, from the abbreviations that peppered the page: her language was a kind of shorthand all of her own, her writing - sprinkled with dots and ellipses and ampersands and capitalised and truncated words, from her nickname, Dec or Decca (after one of her sister's childhood lisping of her name) to her particular style for the place she had lived since her early twenties: "Calif". She liked to conduct exchanges in questions, exclamations, asides, and monosyllables: "Go on, do tell!" "Now, here's the thing!" "Too good!" "So long to know. . ." When she gave a party, which she did, often, spontaneously, generously, with no fuss, she drew up a guest list so that she could let you know exactly who was coming (and why): she was business-like as well as gregarious. Even from such a list, her spirit jumped off the page, as if out of a bottle, as if she were present talking to you with her merry eyes and her dry drawl: no wonder some US archive was collecting every scrap of paper she'd ever scribbled on. Even her shopping lists were idiosyncratic.