Reviews
Nicholas Mosley, son of Oswald Mosley and his first wife, is an admired novelist, most famous for ACCIDENT, filmed by Joseph Losey from a Harold Pinter screenplay and starring Dirk Bogarde. Although he has previously published an autobiography, Nicholas Mosley has hitherto avoided writing about his WWII experience, in which his tangled relationship with his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British fascist movement, plays a major part. TIME AT WAR shows Mosley coming of age as a young officer in the forcing house of war and being despatched as part of the Rifle Brigade to join the allies as they fight their way up Italy. At one point he ignominiously loses most of his platoon. Eventually he leads his men to capture a strategic farmhouse not far from Monte Cassino and wins the MC. Mosley gives his account against the backdrop of being the son of Britain's fascist leader who was imprisoned with his second wife (Diana, one of the Mitford sisters) in Brixton jail not long after the outbreak of war. What would have happened if Nicholas had been captured by the Germans and then identified? In fact at one point in the Italian campaign this happens. How he survives demonstrates that fact can sometimes be more bizarre than fiction. TIME AT WAR is both an absorbing war memoir and intriguing account of a relationship unlike any other in WWII. How do you live your life when Britain is fighting the axis powers when your father is the self-proclaimed British fascist leader?
"Nicholas Mosley, for over half a century one of our most original and compelling novelists, now tackles the subject from his own point of view of both artist and soldier: and a soldier, furthermore, who was awarded the Miltiary Cross.... As a novelist, he has always possessed the exciting ability to extrapolate huge, sometimes overwhelming ideas from very particular events. It is this skill that he uses, over and over again, in his memoir... How lucky we are to have him."
MAIL ON SUNDAY
CRAIG BROWN
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