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

Mosley, Nicholas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0953478092 ISBN 13: 9780953478095

Publisher: Persephone Books Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

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About this title

Synopsis:

This biography of the First World War poet Julian Grenfell, first published in 1976, is, we believe, one of the best biographies of recent times - partly because so much of it is about his mother, the fascinating but maddening Ettie Desborough. It is quite short compared with many modern biographies, and very readably written: Nicholas Mosley's career has been as a much-acclaimed novelist, yet for this work of non-fiction he was also able to draw on extremely interesting and previously unused family papers.The subtitle is 'His life and the times of his death' and by that, as Mosley explains in a new Preface, he 'meant to convey the idea that Julian Grenfell's short life was circumscribed by the time into which he was born; that to a young man from Julian's background who grew up in the years leading to the First World War, the style and attitudes of the society around him were such that the chance of death was something almost to be welcomed as a way of dealing with the predicaments that confronted him.'Julian and his generation seemed to want to die in battle: to help the reader towards an understanding of this is the main theme of the book.

It also brings Edwardian society to life, as well as describing in detail his relationship with his mother: this is the strongest element in Julian Grenfell, stronger even than the theme of the welcoming of war.

About the Author:

Nicholas Mosley, b.1923, was educated at Eton, fought in Italy from 1943-5 (being awarded the MC) and read philosophy at Oxford for a year. His early novels - Spaces of the Dark (1951) and Accident (1965), filmed by Losey - were essentially experimental; in the '70s and '80s he wrote the sequence that culminated in Hopeful Monsters (1990). He has published a two-volume biography of his father, Oswald Mosley, and an autobiography. Julian Grenfell: His Life and the Times of his Death (1976) is one of the most original of post-war biographies, drawing on his own work as a novelist of ideas, on the Grenfell family papers (inherited by his first wife) and on his own family background. Mosley, who bears the title 3rd Baron Ravensdale through his mother Cynthia, the daughter of Lord Curzon, has five children; he married for the second time in 1975 and lives in London.

About this edition

• Publisher: Persephone Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0953478092
• ISBN 13: 9780953478095
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 300