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Nicholas Mosley is thought of as an important but almost incomprehensible novelist. For 60 years, he has tapped away like some mad cryptographer, transmitting messages in an unknown code. Occasional successes—Accident was made into a film, Hopeful Monsters won the 1990 Whitbread prize—have heartened but not distracted him. I recently met Mosley—whose books are being published in new editions by Dalkey Archive Press—in his basement flat in north London. Aged 84, he seldom goes out. His voice sounds tired; sometimes it trails off into silence. Yet the occasional flash of the eye and whooping laugh betray inextinguishable high spirits.
Genealogy is not usually the best introduction to a writer, but Mosley’s is odd enough to mention. He is the grandson on his mother’s side of Viscount Curzon, from whom he inherits the title Lord Ravensdale. He is the son of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists and at one point the most unpopular man in Britain. Psychological dogma insists that such a man must be deeply “damaged” and that his work must be an attempt to “come to terms” with his calamitous parentage. But Mosley shows little sign of damage. He was lucky enough to have passed his youth in institutions—Eton, the Rifle Brigade, Oxford—where his father’s misadventures were viewed with irony, not outrage. And he distanced himself from his father’s politics in the 1950s, so has no bad conscience on that score. Today, he remembers his father with affection. “I could talk to him about anything. He saw every side of the question.”
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