Oswald mosley

It’s easy to dismiss the fascistic ideologues who populate Graham Macklin’s book as reactionary cranks of no significance. It’s also a mistake. Fascists have edged uncomfortably close to the mainstream of British politics ever since the British Union of Fascists was founded in 1932 by Oswald Mosley, who two years earlier had been a government minister. In 2009, two British National Party candidates were elected to the European Parliament. The seats were lost in 2014 because the BNP votes transferred en masse to Ukip. If you doubt that the spirit of the BNP infused Ukip, you have only to look at what has happened to it since Nigel Farage decamped.

At the beginning of After the Party, Phyllis Forrester tells us she was in prison. While inside, her hair turned yellowy-white, ‘like the mane of an old wooden rocking-horse’, not out of shock, she reassures us, but because ‘one couldn’t get one’s hair dyed’. She thinks she deserved to be there: ‘What I did was terrible. Terrible. The shame of it will never leave me until my dying day.’ For a long time in Cressida Connolly’s chilling new novel, though, it’s not clear what she has done. The year is 1979, and middle-class Phyllis, who is bitter and alone (her family don’t talk to her any more), recounts her story

Like most trade unionists in the 1970s and 80s I worked with a fair few communists. Men like Dickie Lawlor, Jock Cowan and Maurice Styles, postal workers for whom all events were viewed through the prism of ‘scientific socialism’. Communism gave them a philosophy by which to live their lives, and they were respected as men of principle even by those who abhorred their politics. Marx may have disparaged religion as the opiate of the people (and, in an even more memorable phrase, the sigh of the oppressed), but it was difficult to avoid the term ‘religious zeal’ when describing the way men like Dickie, Jock and Maurice approached their

The geological title of this unhappy memoir is an apt metaphor for fissures in the relationships between individuals of David Pryce-Jones’s extended family. Emotionally and financially competitive but interdependent, benefactors and beneficiaries, Jews and gentiles of various sexual proclivities are depicted grinding away against each other like so many incompatible tectonic plates. Pryce-Jones offers a candid expression of filial impiety for which Eton, Oxford and the Brigade of Guards surely cannot be entirely to blame, although it is true that education far from home, from an early age, has been known to piss children off, as they say. Young boys banished to boarding school may feel tormented by Oedipal yearnings

Max Mosley’s autobiography has been much anticipated: by the motor racing world, by the writers and readers of tabloid newspapers, by social historians, and by lawyers, whom one imagines perusing it with nods, frowns and the occasional wince. Mosley is a barrister of Gray’s Inn, and it was as a lawyer that, with his friend Bernie Ecclestone, he came to dominate motor racing. Their association began in 1964, when Mosley was a pupil in Lord Hailsham’s chambers and Ecclestone was the country’s top used-car dealer, said to be able to value an entire showroom at a glance. Ten years later, when they had both made the transition from driving to