A Life of Contrasts

Diana Mosley is 92 and lives in Paris, surrounded by her books and beautiful furniture. Most of her friends have died and she is almost stone deaf now, robbing her of what she most loved and was gifted at, conversation. And it's her conversation, her wit and sharp tongue that make this autobiography, republished for the first time since 1977, so engrossing.

The life itself was extraordinary by any standards: the Mitford childhood, marriage to Bryan Guinness, later to Sir Oswald Mosley, friendships with Hitler and Magda Goebbels, with Lytton Strachey, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman and countless others, imprisonment in Holloway during the war, and the years exiled in France.

To this she has added new chapters, in which she writes of her grief after her husband's death, of her brain tumour and of her "secret" missions to Germany before war broke out, when she helped set up a radio station to raise funds for the BUF. According to one newspaper recently, her revelations would include that Nelson Mandela, whose trial in Pretoria she attended in 1964, "ought to have been executed". What she writes is "he was a blessing to South Africa, and fully deserved his Nobel Peace Prize". If you actually want to know about Diana Mosley, read this book.