Nicholas Mosley

Nicholas Mosley (born June 25, 1923, London, England—died February 28, 2017, London) was a British novelist whose work, often philosophical and Christian in theology, won critical but not popular praise for its originality and seriousness of purpose.

Mosley graduated from Eton College (1942) and was an officer in the British army during World War II, after which he studied for one year at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1947 he became a full-time writer.

During Mosley’s long writing career, his work underwent several significant stylistic and thematic changes. His early novels, Spaces of the Dark (1951) and The Rainbearers (1955), are set in the period following World War II. His other novels include Corruption (1957), which is concerned with decadence and injustice and shows the influence of Henry James and William Faulkner; Meeting Place (1962), in which an estranged couple is reunited; and Accident (1965), which tells of moral and emotional repercussions of failed love affairs and a fatal automobile accident. In the latter two novels and in Impossible Object (1968) and Natalie Natalia (1971), Mosley adopted a terser style and conveyed moods suffused with anxiety. Accident was made into a 1967 film by Joseph Losey; it featured a screenplay written by Harold Pinter and starred Dirk Bogarde. Assassins (1966) is an unorthodox political thriller. The six main characters of Catastrophe Practice: Plays for Not Acting (1979) appear in the interlinked but individual novels Imago Bird (1980), Serpent (1981), Judith (1986), and Hopeful Monsters (1990), the last of which won the Whitbread Book Award. Mosley also wrote nonfiction, including The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), first written as a screenplay; Julian Grenfell: His Life and the Times of His Death 1888–1915 (1976); and family memoirs, Rules of the Game (1982) and Beyond the Pale (1983). His father, Sir Oswald Mosley, had founded and led the British Union of Fascists (1932–40) and its successor movement, the Union Movement (1948–80). Mosley’s later work includes the memoirs Efforts at Truth (1994), Time at War (2006), and Paradoxes of Peace; or, the Presence of Infinity (2009).