Hopeful Monsters

Although Nicholas Mosley has written two volumes of family biography and a volume of memoirs, he has, until now, avoided writing about his World War Two experiences.

The son of Sir Oswald Mosley who, as the leader of the British Union of Fascists, had been jailed with his second wife, Diana (one of the Mitford sisters), early on in the war ostensibly as a security risk. Despite this, Nicholas was dispatched to join his regiment, the Rifle Brigade, as the Allies fought their way up the Italian peninsula. He came of age in the forcing house of war, surrounded by the constant threat of capture by the Germans.

At one point in the Italian campaign this very nearly happened. How Nicholas got away and survived is an example of how sometimes fact can be more bizarre than fiction.

Time at War

Returning to London from a trip to the West Indies, an aspiring writer encounters a bewitching trio of friends whose magic lies in their ability to turn any situation into fantasy. Previously out of place in the world, the narrator falls in love with the young brother-sister pair of Peter and Annabelle, as well as the older, more political Marius. Reality soon encroaches upon the foursome, however, in the form of Marius’s ailing wife, forcing the narrator to confront the dark emptiness and fear at the heart of his friends’ joie de vivre. In this, his second novel — written in the ’50s and never before published — Nicholas Mosley weighs questions of responsibility and sacrifice against those of love and earthly desire, the spirit versus the flesh.