“Her emotions were on no ordinary plane,” Fanny Logan says of her cousin and best friend, Linda Radlett. “She loved or she loathed. She laughed or she cried. She lived in a world of superlatives.” This is an extremely high standard to set for Linda, heroine of the three-part miniseries adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s satirical coming-of-age novel The Pursuit of Love. But by the time Fanny (Emily Beecham), who also serves as our narrator, describes Linda (Lily James) this way, it’s clear that both she and Pursuit live up to all this talk of superlatives.

Emily Mortimer plays a small role throughout as Fanny’s mother, referred to as “the Bolter” because of her habit of constantly running away from her family to find a new man to marry. The irony is that Linda, raised by uptight, wealthy, xenophobic Matthew (Dominic West) and Sadie (Dolly Wells), has turned out to be her generation’s Bolter, while Fanny seems very much happy staying home and living vicariously through her cousin’s many adventures in love and life in the years between the two world wars.

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