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“... and came across a notice of Hans-Otto Meissner’s biography of Magda Goebbels. The reviewer was Diana Mosley. Fair enough, I thought, she had at least known the woman. Indeed, as she put it herself: ‘I knew Magda and Dr Goebbels quite well. She was charming and beautiful, he was clever and witty.’ Eschewing bleeding-heart compassion, yet unusually ...”

“... Mitford – galumph, galumph – who, unlike her five sisters (in descending order: Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Decca, Debo; there was also a brother, Tom), had little talent for levity. So the jokes are crucial. One occasionally gets the impression, from Mary Lovell’s compelling, fluent and problematically sucker-uppy biography, that she isn’t always ...”

“... age,’ whereas Ernest Simpson just called him Peter Pan.) In contributing The Duchess of Windsor, Diana Mosley has set herself a harder task than most. Her aims are good or at least interesting; their realisation was impossible. There is bound to be an element of moral judgment in any account of the Windsors, but the Duchess has had the worst of it. The ...”

“... sure that the audience is suitably convulsed. ‘Are you shrieking?’ she implores her sister Diana, in the middle of relaying some mildly amusing malice about a friend. To her lover Gaston Palewski (‘Colonel’), she reports that Odette Massigli is having an affair with John Lehmann, who had never liked women before’. ‘Are you ...”

“... Mention of Gerald recalls to my mind that he regularly visited Brixton Prison when Sir Oswald Mosley was interned there as a dangerous Fascist and pro-Hitlerite. When an officious friend warned Gerald that visiting Brixton would bring him, too, under suspicion, Gerald replied, ‘It is when a friend is under suspicion that he needs friends most,’ and ...”

“... Simon Courtauld tells the story of a remarkable human being – well, remarkable being. Even Diana Mosley, Jackson’s best friend, had to concede that he wasn’t quite human, and it takes one to know one. Courtauld provides as lucid an account of his work as the layman could hope for, and it would be hard to improve on his laconic, inconspicuously ...”

“... bruising and left after two years. In his autobiography, Parkinson says that Plomley’s widow, Diana (who’d wanted Plomley’s old friend John Mortimer to get the job), sniped to the tabloids that she didn’t like his voice and thought he wasn’t ‘civilised enough’. The BBC review board also accused him of filling the programme with ...”

“... to Unity, remembered tersely in the Dictionary of National Biography as ‘Nazi sympathiser’. Diana married Oswald Mosley and spent the Second World War in Holloway, Nancy was the novelist and Pamela the one everybody forgets about. Debo was known to her older sisters as ‘Nine’ because they thought that was her ...”

“... Blum’s Jewishness on only one other occasion, when she mentions how ‘ironic’ it is that Diana Mosley, who ‘bravely’ endured war-time imprisonment for her Nazi sympathies, should, in old age, be so intimidated by an old Jewish lawyer. Blum’s Jewishness clearly has a significance for Blackwood, but the manners or qualities that it is ...”

“... as Of a Certain Age, where the subjects talked themselves into a corner not far from the truth. Diana Mosley felt cosseted enough by Attallah to explain about the Jews that ‘collectively, so to speak, they may be deprecated by certain people but individually they’re considered brilliant, charming, clever.’ Though ‘they were anti-...”

“... French businessman, Charles Bedaux. Perhaps her most consistent British confidante and friend was Diana Mosley, Sir Oswald’s wife. As the Windsors and the Mosleys grew old in exile, they took regular solace together, meeting and dining twice a week and musing about the great times they could have had if only the British had seen sense and sided with ...”

“... the country-house retainers the Redesdales ought to have been). The silliest daughters, Unity and Diana, did worse: they persuaded their parents to become Nazi supporters in real, horrible life. Jonathan Guinness is in a difficulty when writing about his mother and his aunts. He is the son of Diana, the most unpopular of ...”

“... Nicholas Mosley’s parents, Cynthia Curzon and Oswald Mosley, were married in the Chapel Royal, St James’s on 11 May 1920: ‘Cimmie’s wedding dress had a design of green leaves in it, in defiance of a superstition that green at a wedding was unlucky: there was also a superstition that it was unlucky to be married in May ...”

“... It is 26 years since Oswald Mosley breathed his last at the Temple de la Gloire, the athletic frame which he had once so proudly flexed now sadly bloated, his piercing eyes shrunk to peepholes, the sinister moustache long shaven. It is 66 years since Churchill brought his serious political career to an abrupt end by interning him in Brixton jail ...”

“... is pathetic, when not tragic; and always, at the same time, comic.’ The life of Sir Oswald Mosley was pathetic, tragic and comic, and his son’s humane deliberated biography is itself a notable contribution to ‘The Literature of Fascism’ which T.S. Eliot was judging with that sentence in 1928. In 1928 Oswald ...”