This book is a labour of love, in the sense that I do not believe anybody could have got to know Diana Cooper as well as I have without feeling for her affection strong enough to deserve so extravagant a description. It is not hagiography. When I began work I warned Diana that the many generations of middle-class respectability which lay behind me would make me out of sympathy with her attitude towards, for instance, privilege and money. She was delighted, holding that only a touch of sharp criticism could redeem what she felt must otherwise prove a humdrum enterprise.
People have frequently asked whether it was difficult to write about somebody who was still alive. The only honest answer is – yes. I have sought to meet my problem by pretending that it did not exist. I have constantly appealed to Diana for help in working out who was so-and-so in 1911, why she did such-and-such in 1920. I have talked to her for many hours. When it came to writing, however, I have never asked myself what she would think when she eventually read my book. Except for two short passages at the end where she breaks triumphantly into the present, I have written of her entirely in the past. She for her part has been generous in the correction of errors of fact but has made no attempt to change what must sometimes have seemed to her my perverse interpretation of events and motives.
Whether the book should be published in her lifetime I left to her. She had no doubt that it must be; was indeed amazed that any other idea should have occurred to me. Whatever people might say of the book or her, the result was bound to be interesting and might well be amusing. To reject such a chance of fun would have been contrary to her every instinct and the pattern of her life.