Nicholas Mosley

Hopeful Monsters is a tour de force of intellect and eros - one in which Albert Einstein taunts a lecture hall full of Nazis and Ludwig Wittgenstein is an awkward guest at an English garden party. It is a love story in which a young English physicist and a German-Jewish anthropologist pursue each other across landscapes that range from Hitler's Germany to Los Alamos on the eve of the atomic age. It is also a pyrotechnically accomplished novel of ideas in which communism, psychoanalytic theory, uncertainty, and relativity attain visceral emotional force and help us understand the cataclysms of the twentieth century.

Hopeful Monsters

Hafiz is a twenty-five year old Muslim doing post-graduate work in genetics a the University of Beirut. He is one of a team working on the possibility of fashioning a biological weapon that would be effective against some ethnic groups and not others. This project seems to him impossible, but still highly dangerous. Lisa is a sixteen year old Israeli girl who feels threatened by the Jewish insistence on dwelling on memories of the Holocaust. She looks for a way out to a future. Maurice Rotblatt is a middle-aged ex-television-guru who comes to the Middle East and calls for a plague on all ethnic and religious belligerents. He then disappears. His friends in England wonder - is he a victim? A trickster? Or has he left hints about some hope for the future?The story ends in September 2001. It is by the ability to look at the interweaving actions and aspirations of many different characters - in Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, England - that there might be a chance, it is suggested, for humans to be nudged out of their self-destructive genetic and environmental conditioning. Inventing God is a fascinating book and highly topical new novel from a previous winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

Inventing God

Catastrophe Practice

Impossible Object

"Published with the assistance of the Illinois Arts Council."

Accident

Analysis of an unfulfilled, unhappy love a young englishman bears for his beautiful but egoistic cousin.

A Novel

Corruption

Assassins

"Assassins" . Traduit de l'anglais par Louise Servicen

Sir Oswald Mosley and Family, 1933-1980

Beyond the Pale

"Natalie Natalia"?is Nicholas Mosley's brilliant examination of political life. It revolves around Anthony Greville, a conservative Member of Parliament who is tormented by his ambivalence toward his career, by his religious doubts, and by his adulterous affair with Natalia Jones, the enigmatic wife of a colleague. The course of their affair dramatizes love in its most creative and perilously destructive aspects, the two facets symbolized in the two names he has for his lover: "I sometimes called Natalia Natalie instead of Natalia," Greville says, "when she was the ravenous rather than the angelic angel... What Natalie said was often a code for what Natalia was meaning." Ranging in setting from England to Central Africa, the novel is a remarkable investigation of ethics, with fiction itself as an ethical activity.

Natalie Natalia

A political and spiritual thriller by the author of the Whitebread Award-winning Hopeful monsters.

Children of Darkness and Light

This vivid and strikingly witty novel examines the contradictions between the public face and the private experience. Nephew to the prime minister of England, eighteen-year-old Bert tries to make sense of the grown-up world around him, a colourful crowd of television personalities, politicians, young, Trokatires, pop stars, and eccentric relatives. With the help of his laconic psychoanalyst, Bert questions the relation between exterior and interior reality, while Mosley himself questions art's ability to convey these different realities. Both Bert and Mosley triumph over these challenges by the end of this engaging and innovative novel.

Imago Bird

As one of the characters in Assassins says, "Tolstoy was right, you can't beat the Gods. It's the small things - the warp and woof - that make up the pattern. And how much influence do we have over the small? Now that's a theme for a modern writer." And Nicholas Mosley is this writer. Part political thriller and part love story, Assassins explores the "small things" that give shape and meaning to the "big events."

Catastrophe Practice, in the form of three plays with prefaces and a novella, follows six characters trying to find their way through some catastrophe that is less in the world outside than in their minds. Drawing upon catastrophe theory to examine the discontinuities in human personality and our tendency to progress suddenly rather than smoothly, the six characters struggle to disrupt traditional ways of being. These characters feel that conventional ways of interpreting the world have become destructive ?conventional language, conventional feelings, conventional situations ? and try to find a way to realise genuine experience.

Paradoxes of Peace continues the meditation of Mosley's Time at War, at the end of which he wrote that humans find themselves at home in war because they feel they know what they have to do, whereas in peace they have to discover this. But what should inform them--custom? need? duty? ambition? desire? Forces pull in different directions--fidelity versus adventurousness, probity versus fun. During the war, Mosley found himself having to combine fondness for his father, Oswald Mosley, with the need to speak out against his post-war politics. In times of peace, his love for his wife and children, too, seemed riddled with paradoxes. He sought answers in Christianity, but came to see organized religion as primarily a social institution. How does caring not become a trap?

Paradoxes of Peace, Or, The Presence of Infinity

John Banks

In his recent novels--including his award-winning Hopeful Monsters--Nicholas Mosley has investigated the patterns that govern our mental and emotional lives and the possibilities that we have for change, and nowhere has he explored such themes with greater concentration than in Catastrophe Practice. A unique book whose characters and concerns are the basis for the other four novels of the Catastrophe Practice Series - Hopeful Monsters, Imago Bird, Judith and Serpent--Catastrophe Practice is remarkable both in its form (three plays with prefaces and a novella) and in its ability to convey the complexities of thought. Drawing upon catastrophe theory to examine the discontinuities in human personality and our tendency to progress suddenly rather than smoothly, the six characters of Catastrophe Practice struggle to disrupt traditional ways of being. These characters (and the author) feel that conventional ways of interpreting the world have become destructive--conventional language, conventional feelings, conventional situations--and try to find a way to realize genuine experience. The basic optimism of the book is affirmed in the fact that the characters do progress, as they move away from the tragic or comic models hitherto provided by literature into categories more suited to growth and actualized living.

Plays for Not Acting, and Cypher, a Novel

A biography of the First World War poet Julian Grenfell. It helps readers to understand why Julian and his generation seemed to want to die in battle. It also brings Edwardian society to life, as well as describes his relationship with his mother.

Julian Grenfell, His Life and the Times of His Death 1888-1915

Although Nicholas Mosley has written two volumes of family biography and a volume of memoirs, he has, until now, avoided writing about his World War Two experiences. The son of Sir Oswald Mosley who, as the leader of the British Union of Fascists, had been jailed with his second wife, Diana (one of the Mitford sisters), early on in the war ostensibly as a security risk. Despite this, Nicholas was dispatched to join his regiment, the Rifle Brigade, as the Allies fought their way up the Italian peninsula. He came of age in the forcing house of war, surrounded by the constant threat of capture by the Germans. At one point in the Italian campaign this very nearly happened. How Nicholas got away and survived is an example of how sometimes fact can be more bizarre than fiction. Time at War is both an absorbing memoir and an intriguing account of a relationship unlike any other in World War Two. How do you live your life as a soldier fighting the Axis powers when your father is the self-proclaimed British fascist leader?

Time at War

Jason is a scriptwriter working on a film about Masada--the fortress where a thousand Jews killed themselves rather than be taken prisoner by the Romans in A. D. 73. He doubts that a film both honest and popular on such a subject can be made, and, while en route to the production site (Jason, producers and stars in first class--his wife and child in tourist), a dispute about the film and a crisis aboard the plane forces Jason to look at his life, his art, and the world around him in several different ways at once.

Nicholas Mosley

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