Mark McGinness

America’s Montaigne, Gore Vidal, was born 100 years ago today. Born Eugene Luther Vidal, this Virgil of American populism entered the world on 3 October 1925 (‘Shepherds quaked’, he later said, describing his arrival in his typical, wildly egotistical way). His father, Eugene Luther Vidal – after whom he was named – was a former quarterback, Olympian and the founder of three commercial airlines. While he worshipped his father, Vidal had a hateful relationship with his mother, Nina Gore, a beautiful monster who would go on to marry two more times following her divorce from Vidal senior. Vidal's formative friendship was with Nina’s father, Thomas Pryor Gore, the blind senator from Oklahoma. Young ‘Gene’ read him Voltaire, Gibbon, Shakespeare.

Anthony Powell died on 28 March 2000, twenty-five years ago today. It is also fifty years since he completed his 12-novel series, A Dance to the Music of Time, written over a quarter of a century. How well has this unique opus worn? With a title taken from Poussin's masterpiece of the four seasons, Dance, has been described as 'Proust Englished by P.G. Wodehouse'. But perhaps Powell's closely-observed study of 20th-century bohemacy has suffered from being too real: its texture a trifle tweedy; its colours slightly faded. Anthony Powell, the novelist, deserves to be read Powell was not an escapist like Wodehouse; a moralist like Orwell, nor a satirist like Waugh.

Nancy, the first – and perhaps most famous – of the six Mitford girls, died half-a-century ago on 30 June. The lives of the Mitford sisters seem as remote today as Jane Austen’s Bennett sisters. It is almost impossible to separate the family from their fictional equivalents. The books that made them so, Nancy's The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, have become classics, still in print today, creating cult figures of her already notorious family. The intensely autobiographical nature of her fiction might suggest a lack of creative imagination but the real-life models she was so brilliantly able to draw on – with little embellishment – made it all the more fascinating for appearing to be true.

The lives of the Mitford Sisters have riveted, and repelled, anglophiles since the thirties. Diana Mitford once wrote, 'I must admit "the Mitfords" would madden ME if I didn’t chance to be one'. Their hold on the public imagination can be attributed to a mixture of aristocratic eccentricity, romance, rebellion, devotion, betrayal, estrangement, tragedy, and loss; and through it all, a uniquely irrepressible wit. And although much of it will survive in the memoirs, biographies, novels, and collected letters they and others have written, the last living link has been lost with the death of Deborah, the youngest of that astonishing sextet.