Author(s): Anne De Courcy

Biography & Memoir

A fascinating and controversial life of Diana Mosley, wife of the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, and friend to Adolf Hitler.

Diana Mosley was one of the most fascinating and controversial figures of recent times. For many, she was a cult; for others, anathema. In hundreds of hours of taped interviews, she not only spoke to the author with extreme frankness about her life and beliefs but, during the course of several years, gave unprecedented access to her private papers, letters and diaries. The only stipulation made by Lady Mosley was that this book should not be published until after her death.

She was born the Hon. Diana Mitford in 1910. The most beautiful and 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, who was married to Cimmie Curzon. Diana 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 (after the death of Mosley's wife) 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.

During the Second World War, first Mosley and then Diana - who was breast-feeding her eleven-week-old baby - were arrested and detained under Regulation 18B for three-and-a-half years. After the war, they rebuilt their lives, though ostracised by many, making homes first in Ireland and then in the Temple de la Gloire outside Paris, entertaining and being entertained by pre-war friends and new ones, including the Windsors. Attempts by Mosley to enter mainstream British politics failed abjectly; for him at least, the message of the real world finally got through. His death, after almost fifty years together, devastated Diana. Her loyalty to him remained unquestioning, his political beliefs as sacred in death as in life. For years she refused to believe in the reality of the Holocaust.

This gripping book is a portrait both of an extraordinary individual and the strange, terrible world of political extremism in the 1930s.