Fighting free of Father

When the second world war began, Nicholas Mosley, the distinguished novelist son of the fascist leader Sir Oswald, who thought that Britain should not fight Germany and whose second wife, Diana Mitford, counted Goebbels and Hitler as friends, was a 16-year-old schoolboy at Eton. ‘At this time,’ he writes in his new book, in which he reconsiders and reflects on his wartime experiences, ‘I thought my father was a politician less lunatic than most.’ It was a help, he adds, that many Eton boys knew what it was like to be connected to ‘maverick politicians’. Even so, he felt self-conscious when in June 1940 his father was locked up under regulation 18b. However, ‘there were glances, but not much was said’. This note of understated, wry honesty characterises Mosley’s account of his war. Perhaps because his father was such a posturer and performer, he never strikes attitudes; and he never complains, although his position was often difficult and his inner struggles painful.