sections:
Blackshirt reveals the true nature of Mosley's relationship with the Nazis, the Nazis funding of his British Union of Fascists and his desperate attempts - aided by his wife Diana and he sister, Unity Mitford - to support Hitler's regime.
It also challenges the prevailing view of Mosley's descent into anti-Semitism and shows that the campaign against the Jews was a not a response to the failure of his movement but was at the core of the Fascist project - a pre-planned assault whcih drew the admiration of the Nazis.
Was Mosley a potential traitor? Secret files suggest he was prepared to countenance a coup d'etat in order to fulfil his dream of a Fascist state. Hitler never gave up hope of using Mosley in the event of an invasion of Britian as the country's noiminal leader.
With ground-breaking research and extensive use of archive material from Germany, the United States, France, Italy, Ireland and Japan, Blackshirt uncovers a bizarre set of characters and behind-the-scenes friends and colleagues who supported Mosley - crooks, swindlers, political and royal figures, secret agents, Nazi spies, lovers and 'crackpots'.
book reviews
- Sunday Telegraph
"...the most scholarly and, by a good two inches, fattest biography of Mosley to date....The authority of this book rests on thorough research, and Dorril paints the moral landscape with conscientious fairness." - Scotland on Sunday
"Stephen Dorril has written a deeply researched, scholarly and important book. ...Dorril's biography magnificently fleshes out a politician whose sense of personal destiny outstripped his sense of human decency." - New Statesman
"Dorril makes an important contribution to history by exposing the myth that the BUF was too patriotic to accept the charity of Britain's enemies." - Daily Mail
"...exhaustively detailed and comprehensive biography.." - Daily Telegraph
"If you have a stomach for the detail of 20th-century British politics and an interest in fascism, this is the book for you." - London Review of Books
"easy-paced and entertaining, judicious - and damning. We shall not need another. He says pretty well everything that needs to be said, working his way carefully through all the claims made for Mosley and showing how far each one is hollow, misconceived or false."
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