Nicholas Mosley, it goes almost without saying, is the son of Oswald and a reasonably successful novelist (he won the Whitbread Award in 1990). There are really two books in one, making in all for a bulky volume of nearly 600 pages - a lot to read about Mosley, a long-extinct paper tiger who is probably little known to the younger generation. The result has been compared with Gosse's Father and Son, but it seems to me that a better comparison would be with P.G.
Wodehouse (whose Roderick Spode was supposedly modelled on Mosley) or, even better again, Evelyn Waugh. Neither of them, however, ever invented a story quite like this, which shows life imitating art and effortlessly coming off best of the two. The fact is that while Mosley obviously had ability, brains and organising energy, his role as England's Fascist leader had an overall fatuity approaching sheer farce. In the society between the two world wars, British politics appear to have been an exclusive club in which it didn't matter much whether you were left, right or centre as long as you wore the proper school tie, spoke with the right accent and had the appropriate social background. The photographs alone tell the story: you see Mosley (who closely resembled Douglas Fairbanks) with his family posing like a country squire, then in the photo below he is shown addressing a public meeting, in black uniform and giving a passable parody of Mussolini. When the Mosleys were imprisoned by Churchill in the war years, Diana (nee Mitford) wrote pitiful letters about conditions in Holloway, but declared bravely: "A glass of grocer's port and a bit of Stilton cheese helped me through many a sad evening." It cannot have been easy for the younger Mosleys, but Nicholas at least saw some wartime service in Italy, where he was briefly taken prisoner by the Germans. One would like to have known more about his father's period of postwar residence in Ireland, where he must have cut a strange figure. (This book, incidentally, is the basis of the series currently running on Channel 4).