Tag Archives: Booker Prize

From the archive: ‘You’re wicked, you’re insane.’

Sitting in his warmly furnished living room in Regent’s Park, in central London, Nicholas Mosley evokes an air of elegant bohemianism. A celebrated Booker-nominated novelist, winner of the 1990 Whitbread prize for his richly experimental Hopeful Monsters, he is also a skilled memoirist and has worked as a scriptwriter for the film directors Joseph Losey and John Frankenheimer. Now 86, he has just published a new novel and another memoir.

Educated at Eton and Oxford University, sustained by a private income, a baronetcy inherited in middle age, Nicholas has an air of quiet authority and detachment typical of the well-cushioned upper class but an effervescence all of his own. Almost as soon as I sit down, he says, “It’s very fashionable now to say one has had a terrible life. But I have had a rather good one.”

This lightness of spirit is all the more remarkable when you consider his background. For Nicholas, the eldest son of Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists and half brother of formula one boss Max Mosley, is not just a member of one of Britain’s most renowned and controversial public families, he is that most dangerous of creatures – a writer in, and about, the family.

The Mosleys have been back in the headlines of late. Images of Oswald, strutting down London streets in his black shirt, have resurfaced following the election of two BNP MEPs in June. Max Mosley shot to unwelcome prominence last year after being caught engaging in S&M sex games, and subsequently taking on the News of World over intrusion into his privacy. Last week, he agreed not to stand for re-election as president of motor racing’s governing body. This all followed the tragic death of his eldest son, Alexander, 39, in May from an accidental drug overdose.

Of all Oswald Mosley’s children, Nicholas most clearly rejected his father’s rightwing politics while at the same time acknowledging mixed feelings about those close to him. Yet, in the end, Oswald Mosley chose Nicholas to be his official biographer. The resulting two volumes, Rules of the Game and Beyond the Pale, both published in the 80s, offer a candid account of Mosley’s private and public life, which went down well with reviewers.

But the wider Mosley family, including Max, were incandescent. After initially praising the book, privately, Oswald’s second wife, and Nicholas’s stepmother, Diana, told the press it was “the degraded work of a very little man … It’s all very well having an oedipal complex at 19, a second-rate son hating a brilliant father, but it’s rather odd at 60.…

Latest writing

THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY

The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War

PETER MANDLER, 2020

Oxford: Oxford University Press

361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145

Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.

In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.

On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…

Latest news & events

A Cold War Tragedy

Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’

Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.

More information here.

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