Duff Cooper

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Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich (February 22, 1890 - January 1, 1954), known as Duff Cooper, was a British diplomat, Cabinet member and acclaimed author. The son of fashionable society doctor Sir Alfred Cooper, and Lady Agnes Duff (sister of the Duke of Fife), he was the youngest of four children and the only son, and enjoyed a typical gentleman's upbringing of country estates, London Society, Eton College and Oxford.

At Oxford, his Eton friendship with John Manners won him entree into a famous and fashionable circle of young aristocratic "bloods" and intellectuals known as The Coterie, including Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Raymond Asquith (son of the Prime Minister), Sir Denis Anson, Edward Horner, and most famously Lady Diana Manners, the most beautiful woman in England and the "Lady Di" of her day. He cultivated a reputation for eloquence and fast-living, and although he had established a reputation as a poet, he earned an even better reputation for gambling, womanizing and drinking in his studied emulation of the life of Charles James Fox. But his contacts with politicians such as Winston Churchill, H. H. Asquith, Edwin Montagu and others were impeccable.

Following Oxford, he entered into the Foreign Service, and owing to the national importance of his work at cipher desk, he was excluded from military service until 1917, when he joined the Grenadier Guards. He served with distinction as a Lieutenant in the campaigns of 1918, winning the DSO for conspicuous gallantry. Almost all of his closest friends, including Shaw-Stewart, Horner, Asquith and John Manners were killed in the war, drawing him closer to Lady Diana Manners, whom he married in 1919. An extremely popular social figure hailed for her beauty and personal eccentricities, she was one of several daughters born to the Duke and Duchess of Rutland; her biological father, however, was believed to be Harry Cust, known as one of the handsomest men of his day.

The Coopers' marriage was fraught with infidelities, notably Duff's affairs with the Anglo-American Singer sewing-machine heiress Daisy Fellowes, the French novelist Louise Leveque de Vilmorin, and the Anglo-Irish socialite and fashion model Maxime de La Falaise.

Returning to the Foreign Service, he became Principal Private Secretary to two ministers and played a significant role in the Egyptian and Turkish crises of the early 1920s before winning a seat in Parliament as a Conservative for Oldham in 1924. He gave one of the most acclaimed maiden speeches of the century, and became known as a stalwart supporter of Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, and a close friend of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill. He became a junior minister in the Treasury office in the late 1920s before losing his seat in the 1929 elections when the Conservative Party was swept out of office.

Turning to literature, he produced one of the most readable short biographies in the language, Talleyrand, which was published in 1932 to critical praise and has remained in print almost continuously since. He returned to Parliament in a by-election in 1931 for St. George's, and served continuously until 1945.

Returning to the Treasury Office as Financial Secretary, he was elevated to the Cabinet as War Secretary in 1935 and promoted to First Lord of the Admiralty in 1937. He completed a biography of Douglas Haig during this period. The most public critic of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy inside the Cabinet, he famously resigned in 1938 over the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler in an act that MP Vyvyan Adams described as "the first step in the road back to national sanity". He later took a prominent role in the famous Parliamentary debate of 1940 which led to Chamberlain's downfall.

He subsequently entered the Cabinet as Minister of Information under Winston Churchill, but after a controversial appointment as Resident Cabinet Minster in Singapore in 1941, he did not play a major role in the direction of the war until appointed the British Government's liaison to the Free French in 1943. He subsequently became Ambassador to France in 1944, and was a great success in Paris. He left office in 1947, was knighted, and devoted himself primarily to literature until his death in 1954 at the age of 63. He produced during this period the classic autobiography Old Men Forget, and was eventually created Viscount Norwich in 1952 in recognition of his political and literary career. His wife refused to be called Lady Norwich, however, claiming that it sounded too much like "porridge," and promptly took out a newspaper advertisement declaring that she would retain her previous style of Lady Diana Cooper.

Duff Cooper's only legitimate child, John Julius Norwich (born in 1929), became well known as a writer and television host, and his granddaughter Artemis Cooper has published several books, including A Durable Fire: The Letters of Duff and Diana Cooper, 1913-50. Another granddaughter is screenwriter Allegra Huston, the only child of John Julius Norwich and Enrica Soma Huston (then married to the American film director John Huston). Duff Cooper also had at least one illegitimate son, William Patten, Jr., whose mother was Susan Mary Patten (better known as the writer and hostess Susan Mary Alsop), the wife of an American diplomat stationed in Paris.

Lady Diana Cooper lived until 1986, producing a three-volume autobiography The Rainbow Comes and Goes that was a best-seller. She also was the subject of a biography by Philip Ziegler, which excavated her youthful career as a film and stage actress, as well as her often tempestuous married life.

Duff Cooper was the subject of a biography by John Charmley, and a major British literary award, the Duff Cooper Prize, was established in his name.

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