Nicholas Mosley

NICHOLAS MOSLEY, b.1923, was educated at Eton, fought in Italy from 1943-5 (being awarded the MC) and read philosophy at Oxford for a year. His early novels - Spaces of the Dark (1951) and Accident (1965), filmed by Losey - were essentially experimental; in the '70s and '80s he wrote the sequence that culminated in Hopeful Monsters (1990). He has published a two-volume biography of his father, Oswald Mosley, and an autobiography. Julian Grenfell: His Life and the Times of His Death (1976) is one of the most original of post-war biographies, drawing on his own work as a novelist of ideas, on the Grenfell family papers (inherited by his first wife) and on his own family background. Mosley, who bears the title 3rd Baron Ravensdale through his mother Cynthia, the daughter of Lord Curzon, has five children; he married for the second time in 1975 and lives in North London.