Mosley, Nicholas 1923–

views updated

Mosley, Nicholas 1923–

PERSONAL: Born June 25, 1923, in London, England; son of Oswald Ernald (a politician) and Cynthia Mosley; married Rosemary Salmond, November 14, 1967 (divorced, 1974); married Verity Raymond, July 17, 1974; children: Shaun, Ivo, Robert, Clare, Marius. Education: Attended Balliol College, Oxford, 1946–47. Politics: Liberal. Religion: Church of England.

ADDRESSES: Home—London, England. Agent—Michael Sissons, PFD, Drury House, 34-43 Russell St., London WC2B 5HA, England; fax: 020-7836-9543.

CAREER: Writer. Became third Baron Ravensdale, 1966; inherited father's baronetcy, 1980. Appeared in motion picture Accident, 1967. Military service: British Army, 1942–46; became captain.

AWARDS, HONORS: Whitbread Award, 1991, for Hopeful Monsters.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Spaces of the Dark, Hart Davis (London, England), 1951.

The Rainbearers, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1955.

Corruption, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1957, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1958.

Meeting Place, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1962.

Accident, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1965, Coward (New York, NY), 1966.

Assassins, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1966, Coward (New York, NY), 1967.

Impossible Object (also see below), Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1968, Coward (New York, NY), 1969.

Natalie Natalia, Coward (New York, NY), 1971.

Children of Darkness and Light, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1996.

The Hesperides Tree, Dalkey Archive Press (Normal, IL), 2001.

Inventing God, Dalkey Archive Press (Normal, IL), 2003.

Look at the Dark, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 2005, Dalkey Archive Press (Normal, IL), 2006.

"CATASTROPHE PRACTICE" SERIES

Catastrophe Practice: Plays for Not Acting, and Cypher, a Novel, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1979, revised edition, Dalkey Archive Press (Elmwood Park, IL), 1989.

Imago Bird, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1980, revised edition, Dalkey Archive Press (Elmwood Park, IL), 1989.

Serpent, Secker & Warburg (London, England) 1981, Dalkey Archive Press (Normal, IL), 1990.

Judith, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1986, revised edition, Dalkey Archive Press (Normal, IL), 1991.

Hopeful Monsters, Dalkey Archive Press (Normal, IL), 1990, revised edition, 2000.

NONFICTION

African Switchback (travel), Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1958.

The Life of Raymond Raynes, Faith Press (London, England), 1961.

Experience and Religion: A Lay Essay in Theology, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1965, United Church Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1967, Dalkey Archive Press (Normal, IL), 2006.

The Assassination of Trotsky (also see below), M. Joseph (London, England), 1972.

Julian Grenfell: His Life and the Time of His Death, 1888–1915, Holt (New York, NY), 1976.

Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley, 1896–1933 (also see below), Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1982.

Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family, 1933–1980 (also see below), Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1983.

Rules of the Game/Beyond the Pale: Memoirs of Sir Oswald Mosley and Family, Dalkey Archive Press (Normal, IL), 1991.

Efforts at Truth: An Autobiography, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1994, Dalkey Archive Press (Normal, IL), 1995.

The Uses of Slime Mould: Essays of Four Decades, Dalkey Archive Press (Normal, IL), 2004.

Time at War (memoir), Dalkey Archive Press (Normal, IL), 2006.

OTHER

(Editor) Raymond Raynes, The Faith: Instructions on the Christian Faith, Faith Press/Community of the Resurrection (Leighton Buzzard, England), 1961.

(With Masolino d'Amico) The Assassination of Trotsky (screenplay), C.I.A.C./Dino de Laurentiis/Josef Shastel Productions, 1972.

Story of a Love Story (screenplay; based on author's novel Impossible Object), Franco-London Films, 1973.

Also author of introduction, The Tide Is Right, by Hugo Charteris, Dalkey Archive Press (Normal, IL), 1992. Prism, joint editor, 1957–59, member of advisory board, 1960–65, poetry editor, 1962–65.

ADAPTATIONS: Some of Mosley's novels have been adapted as motion pictures, including Accident, written by Harold Pinter, directed by Joseph Losey, London Independent, 1967; and Hopeful Monsters, 1996. Mosley's memoirs were adapted as the television program Mosley, 1998.

SIDELIGHTS: Nicholas Mosley is regarded by many critics as one of the most innovative English novelists to emerge since World War II. As one Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor put it, the author is "one of the most individualistic and interesting of postwar English novelists." The essayist further noted that Mosley has "followed his own path with artistic integrity, avoiding every kind of fashionable fiction during a period when modishness has been widespread." In addition to novels like the Whitbread Award-winning Hopeful Monsters, Mosley has also published family memoirs in which he wrote of his controversial father, Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists.

Over the course of his career, Mosley has gone through several changes in writing style in an attempt "to invent fictional forms capable of dealing adequately with both the complexity of contemporary experience and the perplexing nature of reality," as the Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor explained it. The first phase of Mosley's career, during the 1950s, saw the author publish three novels: Spaces of the Dark, The Rainbearers, and Corruption. Each dealing to some degree with the effects of World War II, these works "are essentially realistic in mode, although they explore beneath the level of character and society to locate a metaphysical or spiritual malaise in postwar Western civilization," remarked a Contemporary Novelists contributor.

From the beginning, Mosley has been concerned with the limits of what can be expressed through language. In Spaces of the Dark, for example, Mosley writes of a dying German soldier who speaks emphatically, and unintelligibly, to the British narrator who, despite not knowing the language, finds himself compelled to memorize the message he has received because of the force of its delivery. "Thus the speech achieves its point—a testament of faith … precisely because it was unintelligible," John Banks explained in the Review of Contemporary Fiction. In Experience and Religion: A Lay Essay in Theology, Mosley outlines what Banks called the "central paradox of the human condition," the importance of language to human society and its inability to meet "our higher purposes." This essentially spiritual outlook colors all of Mosley's later writings.

Intrigued by the Anglican religious magazine Prism, Mosley turned to writing nonfiction in the late 1950s. For a time he served as editor of Prism, writing a number of articles and reviews for the magazine until it was merged with another publication in 1965. At this time he also published Experience and Religion, a theological study, and The Life of Raymond Raynes, a biography of an Anglican monk, and edited The Faith: Instructions on the Christian Faith.

When Mosley returned to the novel in 1962 with Meeting Place, it marked a change in his writing. Whereas the earlier novels are written in a highly detailed, complicated fashion, Meeting Place features a pared-down prose style and is told in an elliptical manner. The novel ends with an assertion of faith as an estranged married couple is reunited. This spiritual element is also found in his next novel, Accident. It tells the story of a university don and a novelist who bear responsibility for a young man's death in a car crash. With this novel Mosley reached what the Dictionary of Literary Biography essayist called "the first high point in his career, the vindication of his innovative techniques at this time." The writer added: "Highly distinctive of Accident is the spare, compressed, and selective way in which this story … is told. There is an intense nervous edginess in the writing, with its verbal fragments and staccato rhythms." Writing in New Statesman, Adrian Mitchell reported that Mosley "uses sentences like stepping-stones: the gaps between them may seem incredibly wide at first glance, but you can always get to the other side." A Times Literary Supplement critic found that "the texture of the writing itself is deliberately simple; the complexity arises from the way in which the parts are put together." Although noting a comparison between Mosley's method and that of the French nouvelle vague, the critic explained that Mosley also uses an "unusual and paradoxical combination of a highly sophisticated, determinedly 'contemporary' and sympathetic awareness of atheistic despair, something that is much in the air nowadays, with an evidently well developed, even doctrinal, Christianity."

With Impossible Object Mosley further developed his pared-down style, connecting eight seemingly independent stories with brief interludes set in italics. These interludes highlight recurring themes in the stories, obliquely tying them into a single work. Robert Scholes, writing in Saturday Review, called these interludes "brilliant prose constructions, combining images and perspectives with a vigor and control reminiscent of the later work of Picasso." Scholes added: "These little pieces frame the 'real' action, but the word 'frame' is too inactive to convey how they really operate. Mosley uses his perspectivist parables as a way of generating an emotionally charged field of ideas and attitudes which then cluster around the situations in the 'real' stories, illuminating them with a fabulous phosphorescence." In his review for the New York Times Book Review, Saul Maloff found that "like Pinter, Mosley is most effective—which is to say first-rate—when he is most menacing, deadly; when, laconically, he proposes, surprising our expectations, the tense union of affective opposites—the excitement of fear, the exhilaration of terror, persistent hints of the nameless and uncaused in human conduct."

The distinctive prose of Impossible Object's interludes is further developed in Mosley's next novel, Natalie Natalia. This novel tells the story of Anthony Greville, a member of Parliament who sees his mistress as two contrasting people: Natalie, the ravenous side, and Natalia, the angelic side. "What Natalie said," he remarked at one point, "was often a code for what Natalia was meaning." "The disorder of Greville's private life mirrors the disorder of his public life," observed the Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor. Saturday Review critic Scholes called Natalie Natalia "a remarkable fusion of sex and politics." He found that "the bizarre appropriateness of [Mosley's] prose to the actualities of political life is dazzling." Maloff, writing in Commonweal, considered the most impressive aspect of the novel to be Mosley's voice. "To sustain the sense of 'perpetual anxiety,' Maloff wrote, "is a difficult achievement; and to evolve a style that seems its natural voice is Mosley's impressive gift."

Just after completing Natalie Natalia Mosley was involved in a serious car accident that left him hospitalized for a year. He published no new fiction for some eight years. His return collection, Catastrophe Practice: Plays for Not Acting, and Cypher, a Novel, includes three plays and a novella, and presents a group of characters and several related plots that Mosley drew upon for a series of five novels. Calling the series of novels "one of this country's more ambitious fictional enterprises," A London Review of Books contributor explained that it stresses "the need to devise new structures of thinking and language which would 'provide for both art and science an encompassing covenant'; the need for a new literature of self-consciousness … and the need for new literary forms which jettison the dishonesties of tragedy and comedy in favour of a more explicitly liberal, optimistic and humanist position."

The original collection from which the series evolved was considered by some critics to be obscure in its intentions or deficient in fulfilling those intentions. Tom LeClair wrote in the Washington Post Book World: "What Mosley wants [in the three plays in this collection] is to force the audience to share the actors' self-consciousness. Watching himself watch the self-watching actors and imagining the responses of a theater audience, the reader should recognize his own self-limiting cognitive routines and understand how to discover them."

The obscurity of Catastrophe Practice is not found in the novels derived from that collection's characters and plots. Imago Bird, the first of these, is "a much clearer, more self-assured work than its predecessor," according to Craig Brown in the Times Literary Supplement. LeClair, too, saw the novel as being "eminently accessible." Telling the story of a young man who uncovers a sex scandal in his politically prominent family, Imago Bird focuses on its protagonist's mode of thinking. "Mosley," Brown wrote, "has an uncanny ability to remember and scrutinize the process of thought being transformed into external or internal speech and, like a scientist, he knows that the presence of observation alters the observed." Writing in the Listener, John Naughton called Imago Bird "a skillful, sardonic work with some contemporary references which resonate."

Also derived from Catastrophe Practice is the novel Serpent, which Times Literary Supplement reviewer Peter Lewis called "a more demanding book than Imago Bird" because of its "web of symbolism" and "pattern of elusive correspondences." Revolving around a film writer and his script about the ancient mass suicide of Jews at Masada, the story concerns the related themes of survival and self-sacrifice. When Mosley succeeded in weaving these themes together, James Ladsun averred in the Spectator, he created "a scene of enormous power. Moments of such coherence are rare, but their existence at all suggests that this sequence [the 'Catastrophe Practice' series], while never likely to be entertaining, may prove to be genuinely innovatory."

In 1990 Mosley published the novel Hopeful Monsters, the last in the "Catastrophe Practice" series. In it, he expresses a sense of faith in the ability of mankind to confront and overcome its problems. Two characters—one a British scientist, the other a German anthropologist—recount the story of their lives, and thereby recount the story of the twentieth century as well. First as student friends and later as a married couple, Max and Eleanor meet many of the leading figures of their time, including philosophers, politicians, scientists, and artists. They also participate in its pivotal events: Max is a member of the team that develops the atomic bomb; Eleanor is a nurse during the Spanish Civil War. In the course of their lives, they experience much of the century's agony as well. Hopeful Monsters, Jennifer Potter asserted in the London Independent, "is a gigantic achievement that glows and grows long after it is put aside. In this anthology of our century, one may carp at the bits left out, and one longs for the earthy sound of laughter to puncture the high moral tone. But the final message is of hope."

The hope offered in Hopeful Monsters lies in one of Max's early experiments. As a boy he raised salamanders in a miniature Garden of Eden, accidentally proving that the creatures could successfully adapt to changes in their environment. The salamanders were, Eleanor explained, "creatures that were able perhaps naturally to watch themselves and their relation to the universe." As Potter expressed it, "if, like hopeful monsters, we adapt to our environment, then we, too, might find our way back to the Garden of Eden." Review of Contemporary Literature contributor John Banks believed that Mosley's language is meant to push the reader toward liberation. The author's "allusive, reflexive language," Banks wrote, "is intended to model, sometimes generate, the subtle processes of self-consciousness, thereby forcing recognition of our freedom to bring new patterns to bear upon existence."

Writing in the Spectator, Francis King found Mosley's "intellectual energy and rigour and [his] gift … for summarizing extremely difficult ideas in an easily intelligible manner" to be "extremely impressive." A reviewer for the Voice Literary Supplement considered Hopeful Monsters to be "one of the grandest epistolary novels of ideas of our time," while New Statesman and Society contributor Paul Binding called the novel "enormously ambitious and continuously fascinating." Binding added: "Richly worked, this novel abounds in echoes, images taken up and translated, mutations indeed. The book is thus mimetic of its title, and one hopes that it too will beget a progeny—of other novels which do what the novel's business surely is, to try honestly to clarify what seems so terrifyingly dark and bewildering."

In Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley, 1896–1933 and Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family, 1933–1980 Mosley presents a part biography/part memoir account of his father's long and controversial political career. Oswald Mosley first entered politics after World War I, becoming a member of Parliament in 1919 at the age of twenty-two. At that time he was a member of the Conservative Party. Two years later he became an Independent, then a member of the Labour Party, and finally formed the New Party, which became the British Union of Fascists in 1934. Known for his rousing speeches, good looks, and distinctive black uniform (his followers were commonly called Black Shirts), Mosley argued for peace with Hitler and Mussolini, called for an authoritarian government, and attacked the Jews. His followers routinely provoked street fights and disrupted political meetings. Many prominent Englishmen, including poet Osbert Sitwell, who wrote the lyrics to the Black Shirts' theme song, were attracted to the movement. In 1940 Mosley was imprisoned without charges, only being released at the end of World War II. For the rest of his life he served as leader of the Union Movement, a group urging the consolidation of Europe into a single nation, the subjugation of Africa for its raw materials, and the planned breeding of a higher species of man. As Eve Auchincloss remarked in the Washington Post Book World, the younger Mosley "was naturally proud of his glamorous father and struggled to see him in the best light. It was to be many years before he could accept what was brilliant and perhaps lovable in him while questioning and rejecting much else."

Nicholas Mosley presents his father as a "willful dreamer," a man who never saw the potential danger of his pronouncements. Revealed, too, are the elder Mosley's many sexual conquests and his occasional derision of his wife, children, and servants. Although the two men were not on speaking terms until shortly before his father's death, Nicholas received all of his father's papers. With these papers as his guide, Mosley reconstructed his father's career. He "seeks to be fair to his father and is unsparing of himself," Auchincloss admitted. "[But] there is little left to admire, though Nicholas Mosley, whose life has been conducted in that appalling, charismatic shadow, heroically attempts a balanced assessment." The resulting two-volume biography is, according to Jon Manchip White in the Chicago Tribune, "a magnificent achievement, immeasurably transcending the essential shallowness of its subject. It will take its place among the finest and most absorbing biographies of recent years."

Mosley scrutinizes his own life in Efforts at Truth: An Autobiography. In this memoir, he deals with his work and its relationship to his life, his attachment to and later estrangement from the Church of England, his military service in World War II, his wives and lovers, and his interactions with his father. Nicholas Mosley corresponded with his father even during the elder Mosley's imprisonment, while the author was fighting fascism as a member of Britain's Rifle Brigade. The book is not, however, a typical autobiography, some critics noted. Nigel Nicolson, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, asserted that Mosley's book "is less a step-by-step account of his life than exploration of his states of mind as illustrated in his successive novels." Chicago Tribune Books reviewer Douglas Glover added that Mosley explained how his life affected his work, and vice versa; for instance, "the discovery that, in his early works, he has repeated the self-sacrificing hero motif, leads him to shake off a post-combat depression and locate an unexamined yen for the Church of England." Some might find the book's structure and focus rough going; Times Literary Supplement contributor John Bayley, for one, argued that Mosley's "preoccupation with the novels and what they mean to him … get[s] rather in the reader's way, for the events in them are frequently retold here at some length." In the American Book Review, though, Andrew Essex remarked that "once you retire any preconceived notions of chronology, Mosley's schematic style and self-flagellating honesty begin to cohere and resonate."

Other reviewers praised Mosley's honesty, as well, pointing out that he is forthcoming about his marital infidelities and other less-than-admirable aspects of his life. In the Spectator, Raymond Carr, a longtime friend of Mosley, called Efforts at Truth "blindingly sincere" and at times disturbing. Glover added that "Mosley marks his sins but does not compound them by wallowing in guilt; he does not present himself as a victim of his own faults." Some critics found the memoir too selective, however. Essex noted, for example, that Mosley takes a long time getting to any exploration of his relationship with his father; the significant scenes between the two come late in the book. "There is an overriding sense of things missing here, of details hovering in the margins," Essex concluded. Bayley had a somewhat different assessment, arguing that Mosley detailed many incidents with a "somehow vague but truth-conveying candour." Observer contributor Jane Dunn noted that while "the facts of [Mosley's] life are glanced over … [it] is his intellectual curiosity, his humour and (selective) candour which makes this book so rewarding."

Mosley marked his return to fiction with Children of Darkness and Light, which focuses on Harry, a London-based journalist with marital and drinking problems, who is sent to report on the alleged appearance of the Virgin Mary to children on a hillside near a nuclear power plant in the Cumbria region of England. Harry had covered a story of similar apparitions in the former Yugoslavia a few years earlier; he has been unable to shake disturbing memories of this, and he is intrigued by one of the children who saw the vision in Cumbria—she is a Yugoslavian refugee. The novel is less concerned with the veracity of the children's visions than with the effect of the experience on Harry. Mosley's protagonist "becomes so befuddled by what he sees and by his own dysfunction that he stops asking questions and simply lets events happen to him," noted Peter Stanford in New Statesman and Society. Stanford pronounced the book "Mosley at his best," explaining: "His picture of a man in utter confusion, breaking down before the reader's eyes, is masterly." In the end, though, Harry begins to reach a new level of understanding. He is "a frail adult learning to see," contended James Woodall in the Observer. In the world of the novel, learning to see means, to some extent, becoming childlike. Woodall asserted: "Adults, whether in war or in partnerships, seem intent on mutual damage; children see 'meanings' where, for the adult mind, the light has failed." Children of Darkness and Light is as quirky as most of Mosley's work, showing his style to be "obliquely original," added Woodall.

Like Children of Darkness and Light, Mosley's subsequent novel, The Hesperides Tree, elicited diverse critical reactions. The novel revolves around the activities of an unnamed narrator, a young man who has a series of seemingly coincidental adventures involving a trip to Ireland, several love affairs, and the making of a documentary about rare birds. Francis King, writing in the Daily Telegraph, remarked: "The book certainly contains remarkable things," such as pithy comments on politics and apt descriptions." In Library Journal, Lawrence Rungren praised the work as a "novel of ideas," as are many of Mosley's books, calling it a "provocative meditation on the roles of chance, fate, and myth."

In his sixteenth novel, Inventing God, Mosley tells the story of New Age guru and television personality Maurice Rotblatt, who disappears in Beirut and leaves behind a family and numerous committed followers intent on discovering the mystery behind his disappearance. Rumor has it that Rotblatt is researching potential genetic differences among people of various faiths, an idea that interests some Middle Eastern leaders and a British intelligence agent because the findings may lead to a new type of biological weapon. Writing in the Harvard Review, H.L. Hix commented that "the action consists less in the events that bring the characters into increasingly close and frequent contact, than with the explanations they make to themselves and others for those events." Hix added: "The meaning of events matters more to Mosley's characters than the events themselves." A Complete Review Web site contributor noted: "Mosley follows the lives of a considerable number of characters, most of whom eventually cross paths or at least affect one another," and added: "The book reads quite well and quickly, and there's enough food for thought." Martin Bright, writing in the Observer, particularly noted how the author "examines the three historical paths taken towards the betterment of the human condition—politics, religion and science—and finds a void at the heart of each. It is rare to encounter a novel so unremittingly serious-minded and fearlessly intellectual in its concerns."

Mosley's Look at the Dark presents a British intellectual narrating his own story after he is injured in a hit-and-run accident in New York. As he sits in his hospital bed and is visited by past wives and friends, the narrator ruminates on his past, the state of humankind, and his own specialty of linguistics. Referring to Look at the Dark as "a novel of ideas," Darryl Whetter wrote in the Globe & Mail: "At their best, Mosley's pensees are intellectually resonant and emotionally liberating." Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, commented that the author's "engaging stream-of-consciousness novel raises serious questions beneath the froth of its hilarious repartee." And a Publishers Weekly contributor commented that the author's "observations on the power and limitations of human communication are thought provoking."

Among Mosley's more recent nonfiction pieces is The Uses of Slime Mould: Essays of Four Decades, which presents book reviews, personal reminiscences, and philosophical essays, which include discussions of Nietzsche, Russell, and Keynes. Anthony J. Pucci, writing in the Library Journal, noted that the author "poses difficult questions about a variety of disciplines and suggests methods of finding answers with intelligence and grace." "This collection will satisfy admirers of Mosley's work and will greatly enhance readers' understanding of his formally daring and deeply metaphysical art," asserted a Publishers Weekly contributor.

Evaluations of Mosley's career stress the originality of his work. Often classified as an experimental writer, Mosley more accurately tries "to invent fictional forms capable of dealing adequately with both the complexity of contemporary experience and the perplexing nature of reality," according to his Dictionary of Literary Biography essayist. A Contemporary Novelists contributor noted Mosley's lack of conventional popularity, but added that the author "is acknowledged in the literary world to be one of the most individual and innovative novelists of his generation. What is most striking about his oeuvre as a whole is his ability to break free from one mode of writing and to experiment with something very different in his constant quest for appropriate forms and artistic expression." In a 2002 interview with Roy Flannagan in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Mosley commented on his evolving approach to novel writing: "I'm no longer interested in describing just what human beings are like, or how odd is what they like. I'm interested in what it might be like, if people tried to change things. That baffles people. They may see what I mean, but they don't know what to make of it. My efforts at making things of it don't make a neat story like other books do. I'm going to the inner ways of seeing things. What is important is the way of seeing the story."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 43, 1987, Volume 70, 1992.

Contemporary Novelists, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996, pp. 729-731.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 14: British Novelists since 1960, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983, pp. 191-201.

Modern British Literature, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000, pp. 506-510.

Mosley, Nicholas, Efforts at Truth: An Autobiography, Dalkey Archive Press (Normal, IL), 1995.

Mosley, Nicholas, Time at War, Dalkey Archive Press (Normal, IL), 2006.

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, September-October, 1995, Andrew Essex, review of Efforts at Truth: An Autobiography, p. 16.

Booklist, June 1, 1995, Bonnie Smothers, review of Efforts at Truth, p. 1720; July, 1997, Janet St. John, review of Children of Darkness and Light, p. 1799; February 1, 2006, Donna Seaman, review of Look at the Dark, p. 30.

British Book News, December, 1980, review of Imago Bird, p. 760; April, 1982, review of Serpent, p. 259; December, 1983, review of Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family, 1933–1980, p. 783; October, 1986, review of Judith, p. 600.

Chicago Tribune, June 30, 1991, Jon Manchip White, reviews of Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley, 1896–1933 and Beyond the Pale, p. 3.

Commonweal, December 17, 1971, Saul Maloff, review of Natalie Natalia, pp. 283-284.

Contemporary Review, January, 1980, review of Catastrophe Practice: Plays for Not Acting, and Cypher, a Novel, p. 48; December, 1982, review of Rules of the Game, p. 331; December, 1983, review of Beyond the Pale, p. 331.

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, spring, 2006, Sean Kinch, "Quantum Mechanics as Critical Model: Reading Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters," p. 289.

Daily Telegraph (London, England), January 13, 2001, Francis King, "They Don't Know What's Going on … and Francis King Has a Similar Problem."

Financial Times, April 8, 2005, Jonathan Derbyshire, "Recollections of a Gadfly."

Globe & Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), June 3, 2006, Darryl Whetter, review of Look at the Dark, p. D5.

Guardian (London, England), January 18, 2003, James Buchan, review of Inventing God; April 23, 2005, James Flint, review of Look at the Dark.

Guardian Weekly (London, England), February 10, 2001, Robert Potts, "Implausible Monsters: Robert Potts Chews over the Literature of the Genetically Modified Lab Rat," p. 10.

Harvard Review, June, 2005, H.L. Hix, review of Inventing God, p. 196.

History Today, December, 1983, review of Beyond the Pale, p. 60; March, 1984, review of Rules of the Game, p. 60.

Independent (London, England), June 3, 1990, Jennifer Potter, review of Hopeful Monsters.

Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2005, review of Look at the Dark, p. 1295.

Library Journal, May 1, 1995, Janice Braun, review of Efforts at Truth, p. 97; June 1, 1996, Michael Rogers, review of Natalie Natalia, p. 158; June 1, 1997, Barbara Love, review of Children of Darkness and Light, p. 150; April 1, 2001, Lawrence Rungren, review of The Hesperides Tree, p. 133; July, 2003, Lawrence Rungren, review of Inventing God, p. 124; June 15, 2004, Anthony J. Pucci, review of The Uses of Slime Mould: Essays of Four Decades, p. 70; February 1, 2006, Henry L. Carrigan, review of Look at the Dark, p. 73.

Listener, June 28, 1979, John Naughton, review of Catastrophe Practice, p. 895; October 16, 1980, review of Imago Bird, p. 513; December 10, 1981, review of Serpent, p. 728; October 14, 1982, review of Rules of the Game, p. 27; December 8, 1983, review of Beyond the Pale, p. 28; August 21, 1986, review of Judith, p. 24.

London Review of Books, November 4, 1982, review of Rules of the Game, p. 3; December 1, 1983, reviews of Beyond the Pale and Rules of the Game, p. 3; September 18, 1986, review of Judith, p. 22; July 12, 1990, review of Hopeful Monsters, p. 16.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 17, 1995, Nigel Nicolson, review of Efforts at Truth, p. 8.

New Statesman, April 20, 1957, G.S. Fraser, review of Corruption, pp. 521-522; January 15, 1965, Adrian Mitchell, review of Accident, p. 82; August 3, 1979, review of Catastrophe Practice, p. 171.

New Statesman and Society, June 15, 1990, Paul Binding, review of Hopeful Monsters, p. 34; January 26, 1996, Peter Stanford, review of Children of Darkness and Light, pp. 37-38.

New Yorker, August 5, 1991, David Cannadine, reviews of Rules of the Game and Beyond the Pale, p. 80.

New York Review of Books, March 23, 1978, review of Julian Grenfell: His Life and the Times of His Death, p. 49.

New York Times Book Review, February 2, 1969, Saul Maloff, review of Impossible Object, p. 35; October 24, 1971, Dudley Young, review of Natalie Natalia, pp. 5, 28; November 10, 1985, C. Gerald Frazier, review of Accidents, p. 56; February 9, 1992, Daniel Stern, review of Hopeful Monsters, p. 19; October 29, 2000, Bill Broun, "The Flying Philosophers"; August 12, 2001, Katharine Weber, "Coincidence?," p. 8.

Observer (London, England), November 20, 1994, Jane Dunn, review of Efforts at Truth, p. 21; January 21, 1996, James Woodall, review of Children of Darkness and Light, p. 15; January 12, 2003, Martin Bright, review of Inventing God.

Publishers Weekly, September 20, 1991, review of Hopeful Monsters, p. 119; May 15, 1995, review of Efforts at Truth, p. 65; July 21, 1997, review of Children of Darkness and Light, p. 185; July 9, 2001, review of The Hesperides Tree, p. 45; August 4, 2003, review of Inventing God, p. 57; April 19, 2004, review of The Uses of Slime Mold, p. 50; January 16, 2006, review of Look at the Dark, p. 37.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1991, John Banks, review of Hopeful Monsters, pp. 309-310; summer, 1997, John Banks, review of Children of Darkness and Light, p. 270; fall, 2002, Roy Flannagan, "Nicholas Mosley," p. 55, and "The Way of Seeing the Story: An Interview with Nicholas Mosley," p. 87.

Saturday Review, January 25, 1969, Robert Scholes, review of Impossible Object, p. 31; November 6, 1971, Robert Scholes, review of Natalie Natalia, p. 48.

Scotland on Sunday, April 10, 2005, Stuart Kelly, review of Look at the Dark.

Spectator, November 22, 1980, James Ladsun, review of Imago Bird, p. 25; January 9, 1982, James Ladsun, review of Serpent, p. 22; June 23, 1990, Francis King, review of Hopeful Monsters, p. 30; February 2, 1991, p. 33; November 5, 1994, Raymond Carr, review of Efforts at the Truth, p. 53; February 17, 1996, Michael Hulse, review of Children of Darkness and Light, pp. 30-31; February 12, 2000, Francis King, review of Julian Grenfell, p. 40; January 27, 2001, Miranda France, review of The Hesperides Tree, p. 48.

Stand, winter, 1991, Peter Lewis, review of Hopeful Monsters, pp. 76-83.

Times (London, England), June 3, 1990, John Melmoth, review of Hopeful Monsters, p. 2.

Times Literary Supplement, January 14, 1965, review of The Accident, p. 21; October 27, 1966, review of Assassins, p. 974; October 17, 1968, review of Impossible Object, p. 1171; September 19, 1980, Craig Brown, review of Imgago Bird, p. 1012; October 16, 1981, Peter Lewis, review of Serpent, p. 1192; October 22, 1982, review of Rules of the Game, p. 1149; August 15, 1986, Craig Brown, review of Judith, p. 894; October 14, 1994, John Bayley, review of Efforts at Truth, pp. 27-28; February 2, 1996, Sean O'Brien, review of Children of Darkness and Light, p. 23; January 26, 2001, Eric Korn, review of The Hesperides Tree, p. 21.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), October 8, 1995, Douglas Glover, review of Efforts at Truth, p. 4.

Village Voice, August 20, 2003, Heidi Julavits, review of Inventing God.

Voice Literary Supplement, June, 1991, reviews of Rules of the Game and Beyond the Pale, p. 30; December, 1991, review of Hopeful Monsters, p. 14.

Washington Post Book World, April 30, 1989, Tom Le-Clair, review of Catastrophe Practice, p. 6; July 7, 1991, Eve Auchincloss, review of Rules of the Game and Beyond the Pale, p. 5; November 10, 1991, review of Accident and Impossible Object, p. 12; July 16, 1995, review of Efforts of Truth, p. 2.

Washington Times, June 20, 2004, Merle Rubin, review of The Uses of Slime Mould.

World and I, March, 1992, review of Hopeful Monsters, pp. 351-357.