Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. 1975 edition. Please use photographs to ascertain condition.

About the book >.>.> IT MAY be of some interest to the reader to explain how this bio- graphy came to be written. I first encountered Sir Oswald Mosley early in 1961 when I was an undergraduate at Oxford. Mosley had been invited to the Oxford Union (debating society) to speak against a motion proposing that South Africa be expelled from the Commonwealth. He was sixty-four years old a big man over six feet running somewhat to fat at the time with a trim moustache set in a chubby face. His main opponent was Mr Jeremy Thorpe now the Liberal leader whose wit and passion had long made him a favourite with university audiences and who launched into a sweeping denunciation of enormities which unfitted South Africa for membership of any civilised community of nations. This is what the Union wanted to hear and it cheered him loudly. Mosley evidently had a hopeless task. His main point was that if we insisted on condemning every country which failed to live up to our parti- cular moral requirements we would soon have no friends left in the world. But the highlight of his speech came when he trapped Mr Thorpe in a series of brilliantly timed and calculated exchanges which the Liberal M.P. seemed to have won completely till Mosley demolished him with a final crushing rejoinder. It was a superb example of the art of public debating which failed to win the vote but won for Mosley an ovation. My interest in him was born at this point. I greatly admire courage and intelligence and it had taken the one for a man as unpopular as Mosley to come to the Union at all and the other for him to gain a triumph in that strong- hold of liberalism. How was it that someone with Mosley’s out- standing gifts had come to occupy such a low and generally des- pised position in the national life? Here was the start of an investi- gation which on and off was to occupy me for the next twelve years. (SP)