2006, ISBN: 0b45cf97db08017f0e4cb2f84990af5a

Tochester etc, Dalkey Archive Press, 185p. Gut Aged twenty, and with no war experience, Nicholas Mosley found himself in charge of a platoon of men positioned along the Italian front duri… More...

Tochester etc, Dalkey Archive Press, 185p. Gut Aged twenty, and with no war experience, Nicholas Mosley found himself in charge of a platoon of men positioned along the Italian front during the Second World War. With his father in prison on charges of treason, he had enlisted primarily in an effort to improve his family image. But the war left Mosley a radically changed man: he had gone in out of personal convenience, and left with a sense of greater purpose. Saved from death by one of his men, holed up in barns and trenches and tents, and marching across Europe, Mosley found in war a certainty that eluded him in peacetime. War is both senseless and necessary, squalid and fulfilling, terrifying and sometimes jolly, he writes. This is like life. Humans are at home in war (though they seldom admit this). They feel they know what they have to do. In an interview conducted between 1977 and 1978, Nicholas Mosley said, When I was young William Faulkner was my great love, not just because of the density of style, but because he seemed to be dealing with the question not of what will happen next but what is happening now. The first Faulkner novel I read was The Sound and the Fury, which I got hold of when we liberated a POW camp in Italy in 1944 and I liberated the Red Cross Library. I was about twenty.... What in god's name, after all, was I doing aged twenty in Italy in a war?Weltkriege (Geschichte / Politik) 2006<

2007, ISBN: 0b45cf97db08017f0e4cb2f84990af5a

[PU: Phoenix London 2007], MILITARY WWII WW2 ARMY, Card covers b&w plates 180pp. Near fine. Although he has previously published an autobiography, Nicholas Mosley has hitherto avoided wri… More...

[PU: Phoenix London 2007], MILITARY WWII WW2 ARMY, Card covers b&w plates 180pp. Near fine. Although he has previously published an autobiography, Nicholas Mosley has hitherto avoided writing about his WWII experience, in which his tangled relationship with his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British fascist movement, plays a major part. TIME AT WAR shows Mosley coming of age as a young officer in the forcing house of war and being despatched as part of the Rifle Brigade to join the allies as they fight their way up Italy. At one point he ignominiously loses most of his platoon. Eventually he leads his men to capture a strategic farmhouse not far from Monte Cassino and wins the MC. Mosley gives his account against the backdrop of being the son of Britain's fascist leader who was imprisoned with his second wife (Diana, one of the Mitford sisters) in Brixton jail not long after the outbreak of war. What would have happened if Nicholas had been captured by the Germans and then identified? In fact at one point in the Italian campaign this happens. How he survives demonstrates that fact can sometimes be more bizarre than fiction. TIME AT WAR is both an absorbing war memoir and intriguing account of a relationship unlike any other in WWII. How do you live your life when Britain is fighting the axis powers when your father is the self-proclaimed British fascist leader?<