Nicholas Mosley
has been writing lively and thought-provoking novels, biographies, and
screenplays for more than fifty years, and he is one of England's most
highly respected authors. His novel Inventing God (2003)  has
been praised as fascinating and astonishing. Hopeful Monsters, which
won the 1990 Whitbread Prize, was said by A.N. Wilson to be the best English
novel written since the Second World War, and in the New Statesman
Mosley was described as one of the major writers of our era. Unfortunately
for most of his life he has been better known as the eldest son of the
notorious British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley. Lady Cynthia Curzon,
the daughter of George Curzon, was his mother, and Lady Diana Mosley (neé
Mitford), was his step-mother. The video "Nicholas Mosley: Writing Life"
investigates the links between Mosley's unusual history and the themes
of his highly original fiction, particularly that of the "hopeful monster,"
which is relevant to human evolution.
Other topics include his parents’ personal and political histories, his pivotal experiences in battle during W.W. II, and his becoming Lord Ravensdale. Interspersed with his responses during interviews there are readings from his works, stills from his photo album, clips from his own and Oswald Mosley’s home movies, clips from one of Nicholas's 16 mm films, "The Policeman's Mother," and clips from two of the feature films which have been made from his novels: Accident (screenplay by Harold Pinter, directed by Joseph Losey) and The Story of a Love Story (screenplay by Mosley, directed by John Frankenheimer). This program was designed to serve as an introduction to Mosley’s views and to his approach to writing, for a general, discerning audience, however it is unlike most biographical profiles of authors: I believed that, whenever it was possible, Mosley's story should be told through his own words, that in this way the style of the program might be fitted to the style of his writing, which is to engage the reader in the process of making connections.
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