Nicholas Mosley, 3rd Baron Ravensdale Mosley Biography

British novelistand biographer, born in London, educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford. Since the publication of his first novel, Spaces of the Dark (1951), Mosley's fiction has responded to, and experimented with, ideas. He is an uncompromising writer who has sought narrative forms which reflect intellectual debate rather than succumbing to the rewards of a recognizable style. His early novels, including The Rainbearers (1955) and Corruption (1958), are realistic works. Subsequent novels became more self-reflective, pre-occupied with the divorce between fiction and reality. Accident (1965), which was filmed by Joseph Losey with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, is set in Oxford and concerns academic play with marriage and adultery. Impossible Object (1969) is a series of eight stories connected by the changing viewpoints of different narrators. Eight years after Natalie, Natalia (1971) Mosley produced his experimental Catastrophe Practice: Plays Not for Acting, and Cypher: A Novel (1979). Intended to be the first volume of a sequence of seven novels, it is written in the form of three plays and a novella and appropriates Catastrophe Theory as a science which yields metaphors for the construction of meaning out of chaos. Imago Bird (1980), Serpent (1981), and Judith (1986) followed as the next novels in the sequence of seven. Then came Hopeful Monsters (1990), a novel of ideas comparable to certain works by Aldous Huxley and Doris Lessing, which traces the interconnecting lives of an English physicist and a German radical as they move through the political, philosophical, and scientific development of the twentieth century. Children of Darkness and Light (1996) focuses on a group of children in Cumbria. Rules of the Game (1982) and Beyond the Pale (1983) are biographical works about this father, Sir Oswald Mosley; Efforts at Truth (1994) is an autobiography.