Diana Mosley

Author: Anne de Courcy
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062381679
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Book Description
Diana Mosley was a society beauty who fell from grace when she left her husband, brewery heir Bryan Guinness, for Sir Oswald Mosley, an admirer of Mussolini and a notorious womanizer. This horrified her family and scandalized society. In 1933, Diana met the new German leader, Adolf Hitler. They became close friends and he attended her wedding as the guest of honor. During the war, the Mosleys' association with Hitler led them to be arrested and interned for three and a half years. Diana's relationships with Hitler and Mosley defined her life in the public eye and marked her as a woman who possessed a singular lack of empathy for those less blessed at birth. Anne de Courcy's revealing biography chronicles one of the most intriguing, controversial women of the twentieth century. It is a riveting tell-all memoir of a leading society hostess, a woman with intimate access to the highest literary, political, and social circles of her time. Written with Mosley's exclusive cooperation and based upon hundreds of hours of taped interviews and unprecedented access to her private papers, letters, and diaries, Lady Mosley's only stipulation was that the book not be published until after her death.

The Mitfords

Author: Charlotte Mosley
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061375403
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 868

Book Description
The Mitford sisters were the great wits and beauties of their time. Immoderate in their passions for ideas and people, they counted among their diverse friends Adolf Hitler and Queen Elizabeth II, Cecil Beaton and President Kennedy, Evelyn Waugh and Givenchy. The Mitfords offers an unparalleled look at these privileged siblings through their own unabashed correspondence. Spanning the twentieth century, the magically vivid letters of the legendary Mitfords constitute a superb social and historical chronicle and an intimate portrait of the stormy but enduring relationships between six beautiful, gifted, and radically different women.

The Pursuit of Laughter

Author: Diana Mosley
Publisher: Gibson Square Books
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 596

Book Description
Diana Mitford is one of the surprise discoveries of the phenomenally successful collection of Mitford letters published for Christmas 2007. This paperback edition is expanded with articles on Oswald Mosley and Lord Berners.

Diana Mosley

Author: Anne De Courcy
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 144812803X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 474

Book Description
Diana Mosley was one of the most fascinating and controversial figures of recent times. For some, she was a cult; for many, anathema. Born in 1910 Diana was the most beautiful and the cleverest of the six Mitford sisters. She was eighteen when she married Bryan Guinness, of the brewing dynasty, by whom she had two sons. After four years, she left him for the fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, and set herself up as Mosley's mistress - a course of action that horrified her family and scandalised society. In 1933 she took her sister Unity to Germany; soon both had met the new German leader, Adolf Hitler. Diana became so close to him that when she and Mosley married in 1936 the ceremony took place in the Goebbels drawing room and Hitler was guest of honour. She continued to visit Hitler until a month before the outbreak of war; and afterwards, for many, years, refused to believe in the reality of the Holocaust. This gripping book is a portrait of both an extraordinary individual and the strange, terrible world of political extremism in the 1930s.

Loved Ones

Author: Diana Mosley
Publisher: Pan MacMillan
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description

Diana Mosley

Author: Jan Dalley
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 9780571203512
Category : Fascists
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
Diana Mosley (née Mitford) had brains, beauty and charm, wealth and social position: she risked everything to follow the dark new creed of fascism when, at twenty-two, she fell in love with Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader, and committed her life to his ideas. In Germany she became a friend of Hitler and Goebbels; by 1940, she was in a damp cell in Holloway prison. Jan Dalley's fascinating and undeceived biography cuts through the mythology that has been built up around the Mitford sisters and around the Mosleys and reveals the truth about both an extraordinary life and the web of anti-semitism that stretched through the English aristocracy between the wars.

Wigs on the Green

Author: Nancy Mitford
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307741370
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
Nancy Mitford’s most controversial novel, unavailable for decades, is a hilarious satirical send-up of the fascist political enthusiasms of her sisters Unity and Diana, and of her notorious brother-in-law, Sir Oswald Mosley. Written in 1934, early in Hitler’s rise, Wigs on the Green lightheartedly skewers the devoted followers of British fascism. The sheltered and unworldy Eugenia Malmain is one of the richest girls in England and an ardent supporter of General Jack and his Union Jackshirts. World-weary Noel Foster and his scheming friend Jasper Aspect are in search of wealthy heiresses to marry; Lady Marjorie, disguised as a commoner, is on the run from the Duke she has just jilted at the altar; and her friend Poppy is considering whether to divorce her rich husband. When these characters converge with the colorful locals at a grandly misconceived costume pageant that turns into a brawl between Pacifists and Jackshirts, madcap farce ensues. Long suppressed by the author out of sensitivity to family feelings, Wigs on the Green can now be enjoyed by fans of Mitford’s superbly comic novels.

The Other Mitford

Author: Diana Alexander
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0752478974
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
Pamela Jackson, née Mitford, is perhaps the least well known of the illustrious Mitford sisters, and yet her story is just as captivating, and more revealing. Despite shunning the bright city lights that her sisters so desperately craved, she was very much involved in the activities of her extraordinary family, picking up the many pieces when things went disastrously wrong – which they so often did. Joining her sisters on many adventures, including their meeting with Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, Pamela quietly observed the bizarre, funny and often tragic events that took place around her. Through her eyes, we are given a view of the Mitfords never seen before. ‘Loyal to the core,’ she possessed ‘the constancy and kindness that underpinned the wilder exploits of the Mitford family. Indeed, innocence, along with courage and kindness, was one of her remarkable qualities. But it was the innocence of a woman who had lived and suffered, loved and lost, and overcome adversity’. Journalist Diana Alexander, who was Pamela’s friend for many years, here reveals the unknown Mitford, or, as her lifelong admirer John Betjeman described her, ‘Gentle Pamela’.

Nancy Mitford

Author: Harold Mario Mitchell Acton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781903933015
Category : Novelists, English
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
The only biography in print of Nancy Mitford, written by her friend Harold Acton shortly after her death. Defining an exceptionally witty era whose vanishing continues to fascinate, Nancy Mitford's writings have remained steadfast in their popularity - like those of Evelyn Waugh, her male counterpart. The repackaging of Mitford's novels Love in A Cold Climate, The Pursuit of Love, Don't Tell Alfred (Penguin 2000/1) and a recent television series on the Mitfords have done much to feed the interest in her life. Harold Acton's book is driven by his intimate knowledge of her. Both belonging to a blissfully carefree generation, he shows her as she thought of herself and was seen by those closest to her. Formidable, loyal, amusing and determined, her life was tragic only in that she knew exactly how to handle her fate with a supreme wit reminiscent of Bridget Jones' diaries.

Alive, Alive Oh!

Author: Diana Athill
Publisher: Granta Publications
ISBN: 1783782552
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 122

Book Description
“Enchanting . . . Diana Athill, 98, still has a few things to teach us about growing old with dignity and humor and grace . . . Astute and sparkling.”—Associated Press Several years ago, Diana Athill accepted that she could no longer live entirely independently, and moved to a retirement home in Highgate. Released from the daily anxieties of caring for her own property and free to settle into her remaining years, she reflects on what it feels like to be very old, and on the moments in her long life that have risen to the surface and which sustain her in these last years. What really matters in the end? Which memories stand out? As she approaches her 100th year, Athill recalls in sparkling, precise detail the exact layout of the garden of her childhood, a vast and beautiful park attached to a large house; relates with humor, clarity and honesty her experiences of the First and Second World Wars and her trips to Europe as a young woman; and in the remarkable title chapter, describes her pregnancy at the age of forty-three, losing the baby and almost losing her life—and her gratitude and joy on discovering that she had survived. Alive, Alive Oh! is “so beautifully written and exquisitely detailed . . . [Athill] mines her memories of a life well-lived and generously lays them out on the page for the rest of the world to enjoy” (Star Tribune). “Witty, candid . . . If you haven’t read Athill, and open her latest book expecting serene reflections from a nonagenarian sipping tea in her garden, you’re in for a surprise.”—San Francisco Chronicle