The answer is yes, because this is different, a hugely entertaining collection of vivid, funny, perceptive, moving and sometimes intensely irritating correspondence between all the sisters, beginning in 1925, spanning 80 years and written from locations as disparate as Paris, New York, Vienna and Holloway Prison.

It is an invaluable chronicle, with a stellar cast and sometimes quite brilliant descriptions of people and places, with lots of gossip about the artistic, political and titled movers of the age, among them Evelyn Waugh, Lucian Freud, Churchill, the Windsors, Princess Diana, John F Kennedy, Givenchy and Adolf Hitler, who exerted a near fatal attraction over the young and obsessive Unity Mitford. Unity, a kind of mad Hitler groupie, shot herself in the head in the English Garden in Munich on hearing that Britain had declared war on Germany. She didn't die, but was left with the mind of a child and lingered for another decade or so in the care of her mother, Lady Redesdale, whose husband left her.

These letters, full of pet names, teasing, kindnesses, cruelties and private jokes, were mined from a rich seam of more than 12,000 by Diana's daughter-in-law, Charlotte Mosley. They show clearly the complicated, loving, sometimes bitter and twisted pattern of relationships between the six sisters, and they're just like those you find in any big family.

However, not many families can boast three published and acclaimed authors (Nancy, Jessica, Deborah), two Nazi sympathisers (Unity, Diana), a card-carrying Communist (Jessica), a Duchess (Deborah), and a liberated lesbian (Pamela), the quietest of them all.

In his hilarious novel, Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh sent up his own racy, rebellious, mostly rich, titled, well-mannered, cosmopolitan, highly ornamental, often idle and sometimes talented set, the Bright Young People (or BYPs), a cultural phenomenon fanned by friends and foes in the newspapers and glossy magazines of the time.

One of Waugh's descriptions could be read as pertaining to those modern, moneyed though rarely-titled partygoers of today, who hire white stretch-limos and squeal instead of speaking: "The Bright Young People came popping all together, out of someone's electric brougham like a litter of pigs, and ran squealing up the steps."

D J Taylor, in his recently published and relentlessly researched Bright Young People - The Rise and Fall of a Generation:

1918-1940, gets great mileage out of quoting Waugh, who, as a middleclass member of what was mainly a "toff" phenomenon, stood keenly observing on the sidelines as well as partying along with the best of them. This so-called "lost generation", a loose group of hardliving, mainly gilded girls and boys who came to young adulthood during the two world wars, were disillusioned with the values of their Victorian parents and the fact that most of their older brothers, male cousins and family friends were sent to be killed in the terrible, senseless war of 1914-1918.

Mitfords pop up regularly here, particularly the novelist Nancy and the beautiful Diana, who with her first husband Bryan Guinness, frequently featured in dispatches about the goings-on of the BYPs.

Taylor, who seems to thoroughly disapprove of the "upper classes", is not unkind to the philanthropic Guinnesses, even in his telling of how Bryan's mother was worried that her son was finding it difficult to spend all of his �6,000 annual allowance while a student at Oxford, in an age when a married clerk's wage was �100 per annum.

But Taylor is deeply disapproving of many others, some of them women such as the hard-drinking, idle Labour peer's daughter Elizabeth Ponsonby and the poor, drug-addicted Brenda Dean Paul. But those who come in for the most contempt are the colourful homosexual men who formed perhaps the core of the BYPs . . . Tom Driberg, Stephen Tennant, Cecil Beaton and Robert Byron among others, most of them products of Eton and Oxbridge.

Taylor gives plenty of lurid detail of homosexual "depravity" in Britain and on the Continent.

But his curious dislike of certain "inverts" and his sometimes preachy, over-egged proproletarian tone aside, this book, filled as it is with scandal, gossip, pathos and great quotes, is a fascinating read.

The Mitfords:

Letters Between Six Sisters
Edited by Charlotte Mosley Fourth Estate
�25 834pp
By DJ Taylor
Random House
�20 307pp
Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation
1918-1940