Daily Telegraph 13/08/03: articles and obituary of Lady Mosley (1910-2003)

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Diana Mosley, unrepentantly Nazi and
effortlessly charming
By Andrew Roberts
(Filed: 13/08/2003)

The death of Diana Mosley brings to an end one of the most curious
questions of British upper-class etiquette: how does one deal socially
with an unrepentant Nazi?

One of the funny, charming, intelligent and glamorous Mitford
sisters; a denizen of the "Hons' cupboard''; a dedicatee of Vile Bodies;
a beautiful woman whom Churchill called "Dinamite''; an inspired
interior decorator; a steadfast friend to a wide gal Пre (including some
Jews); a fine autobiographer and loving mother; yet Diana Mosley
was also a woman who could - when she was inadvisedly invited to
appear on Desert Island Discs - describe Adolf Hitler in almost
wholly positive terms.

The social problem was made easy for most people of her
acquaintance during the Second World War because of her long
incarceration in Holloway prison for her fascism.

Lest anyone still believe that her imprisonment was somehow
undeserved, let them read Jan Dalley's generally sympathetic 1999
biography of Lady Mosley, in which it is recorded that, during a
Hyde Park rally in October 1935, she silently gave the Heil Hitler
salute when the rest of the crowd was singing God Save the King.
And that was before she married Sir Oswald Mosley.

Her interrogation by Norman Birkett's Advisory Committee in 1940
- the transcripts of which were finally released in 1983 - confirmed
that it had been quite right to recommend that she stay in jail,
especially after she told them that "she would like to see the German
system of government in England because of all it had achieved in
Germany''.

The key, inescapable difference between Diana Mosley and the
scores of other pre-war pro-Nazis who had changed their political
allegiance once the concentration camps yielded up their
incontrovertible evidence of the profound evil of Hitlerism was that
she was hooked for life.

As the writer Michael Shelden has diagnosed it: "There was no going
back; Diana Mosley's stubbornness and aristocratic pride made her
reluctant to admit that she had made a profound mistake.'' Indeed,
even that puts it too mildly.

Lady Mosley fully appreciated the frisson that would shoot through
a lunch table when she made some fond reference to a Nazi leader.
Nor did it end there.

She helped to finance the British Union of Fascists until the death of
its organiser, Jeffrey Hamm, in 1994, often attending their annual
dinners. In letters I received from her in 1992, she took particular
pleasure in the way that Czechoslovakia, which she wrote "couldn't
last in its 1938 form'', was splitting in two, just as Hitler had
succeeded in forcing it to do at Munich. She even recently wrote to
The Spectator to argue that her late husband "was not an extremist''.

The problem of how to deal socially with Lady Mosley was not
made that much harder after her release from Holloway in 1943,
especially once she went to live in France after the war.

British ambassadors were instructed, as if they really needed to be,
not to invite the Mosleys to the embassy, and, other than the Duke
and Duchess of Windsor, they made few new friends. But old
friendships and ties of blood, especially through the children of
Diana's first husband, Bryan Guinness, meant that they were never
short of visitors to their beautiful house outside Paris, Temple de la
Gloire, which was originally built for General Moreau in 1800 to
commemorate the battle of Hohenlinden.

When I visited the Temple to interview Diana Mosley for a book I
was writing about Churchill's contemporaries, I was subjected to the
full force of her superb Mitfordesque charm, and I am ashamed to
say that I loved it. There was not a trace of pomposity to her - "How
snooty I looked in those days'', she said of a photograph of herself -
nor of the boorishness one expects (and rather hopes for) fro m
fascists. Yet she never failed to appreciate the effect of occasionally
flashing a view of the cloven hoof.

"Hitler was attractive,'' she told me, "though not handsome, with
great inner dynamism and charm. Charm can mean so mean so many
things; I don't suppose I've met anyone quite so charming. It might be
just that he was powerful, I suppose, but it seemed more than that.''

I asked about the Holocaust, of course, expecting a David Irving-style
refutation, but was astounded not to get one. "I'm sure he was to
blame for the extermination of the Jews,'' she answered. "He was to
blame for everything, and I say that as someone who approved of
him.''

Was that use of the past tense an admission? Had she in fact changed
her mind about the F Яhrer? So I asked her again, hoping that I would
not have to think this beautiful aristocrat a monster because of her
disgraceful views.

When she married Mosley in a civil ceremony in Joseph Goebbels's
"ordinary, middle-class drawing room'' in Berlin in 1936, the only
guests (besides the witnesses) were Hitler and Goebbels hims elf.
Fifty-two years and a world war later, I wondered, what she would
do if the F Яhrer walked into the room? "I should have to be pleased,''
she replied, "and ask him how it had been in Hell, or Heaven, or
wherever he'd been.''

There it was; the same disdain for equivocation that later led her to
talk to Sue Lawley about Hitler's lovely blue eyes, the same inability
to admit that the central fact about her life had been disastrous, that
fascism was evil and that the man she had worshipped - Oswald
Mosley, "Tom'' to his friends, "Kit'' to her - had wasted his
undeniable talents upon a foul lie.

There were several people who told me in the course of my
researches - including another of Oswald Mosley's lovers, Lady
Alexandra "Baba'' Metcalfe - that Diana was the more dangerous of
the couple, because she was more fanatical than her husband back in
the 1930s. Her own sister, th e novelist Nancy Mitford, told the
Home Office as much in 1940.

I like to think that she stuck to her repulsive views out of love for her
husband and because her beloved sister Unity had attempted to
commit suicide for them on the outbreak of war, and that to denounce
them would have been a betrayal of her.

Whatever the reason, Diana Mosley took her disgusting, unchanged
views to her grave, and now she can ask the F Я hrer herself how he
has fared "in Heaven, or Hell, or wherever he'd been''.

Blonde who captivated Hitler
(Filed: 13/08/2003)

Philip Delves Broughton looks at the life of the woman who was
once the poster girl for English fascism

If you believed Diana Mosley's friends, she was simply incapable of
lying. She could have begged forgiveness for supporting Hitler,
blaming it on a dilettantish crush. She could have said she was blinded
by love for her husband into saying and doing things she would later
regret.

But she did neither. She owned up.

The Nazis, she often said, turned out to be a disappointment. But
that could never erase the fact that they had once seemed a very good
thing to a great many people.

Diana Mosley, she wanted you to know, was not the only one who
had thought this way. Just the only one to have to live the rest of her
life with the consequences.

She died on Monday in Par is in her flat on the Rue de L'Universite,
overlooking the gardens of the Ministry of Defence, a stone's throw
from parliament.

She had been in bed since suffering a mild stroke a week earlier. Her
death, according to the death notice posted by her sister, the Duchess
of Devonshire, was "peaceful".

She is expected to be buried at Swinbrook, her family's home in
Oxfordshire.

It never helped Diana Mosley's reputation that she looked like a Nazi
fantasy sprung to life: tall, blonde and with a cool blue gaze that
captivated everyone from Evelyn Waugh to the Fuhrer.

Her elongated vowels and apparent disregard for what people
thought of her compounded her public image as a cold-hearted
aristocrat. She was the poster girl for English fascism, symbolising
how moral ly rotten the upper classes had become.

Later in life, however, she assiduously defended her own and her
husband's reputation.

Last year, the Public Record Office released Secret Service documents
from just before the Second World War which called her "a public
danger" and "far cleverer and more dangerous than her husband and
will stick at nothing to achieve her ambitions".

The day after an article appeared in this newspaper reporting the
claims, a fax arrived in The Da ily Telegraph's Paris office inviting me
to hear her side of things.

"Oh, it's too wonderful really," she said, rocking back on her pale
blue sofa and reading the allegations. But after this casual brush-off,
she launched into a detailed account of why exactly the documents
were wrong.

Thoug h she could barely hear, she never lost her train of thought. She
explained why her husband had so many guns when he was arrested -
they were for hunting and shooting, not for launching an armed coup;
she said why he had been so prescient about the need for European
integration and bemoaned the lack of politeness in contemporary
politics.

When her husband was politically active, she said, they frequently
argued with communists in political settings but "if you met them at
dinner, you wouldn't have a row".

She said she despised the kind of "crusty old Tory nationalism"
preached by extreme Right demagogues such as Jean-Marie Le Pen,
leader of the French National Front, and that Sir Oswald was never
"extreme Right". Her sometimes blithe dismissals of her past and
those who demanded that she apolog ise for it concealed a
determination that her personal history be properly understood,
however difficult that might be.

She called her 23 grandchildren a "sort of cushion in one's life really",
against both old age and the still frequently heard taunts that she is an
unrepentant Nazi.

Since her husband's death in 1980, she remained in Paris, writing
book reviews and taking brisk walks along the Seine. She lunched
frequently in Tante Marguerite, an immaculate French restaurant
close to her flat and opposite the offices of French Vogue magazine.

The staff there would be fascinated to see her walking past in her old
Dior and Balenciaga outfits, cinched at her miniscule waist. Few,
however, knew quite how controversial she had once been.

During the 1930s, when Britain first became fascinated by t he
Mitford sisters, their eccentric private lives and shifting political
allegiances, one newspaper ran the headline: "Mixed up Mitford girls
still confusing Europe."

Jessica Mitford had just run off with Churchill's nephew, Esmond
Romilly, to fight with the Communists in the Spanish Civil War;
Diana and Unity were swooning over Hitler, and Nancy was outraged
with them and their mother, Sydney, for admiring the Nazis.

In her memoirs, A Life of Contrasts, Diana Mosley writes about this
time and the Nazis she met as if they were guests at a country house
party. Asked once what she best remembered about Hitler, she said:
"The jokes!"
At the time of her internment, she said her main concern was looking
after her two infant children. Politics was a single thread in the far
broader weave of her life as a wife, mother and sister.

This thread, however, made her a figure of public scorn and soured
relations with her sisters Nancy and Jessica who were disgusted by
her Nazism and anti-Semitism.

Diana and Jessica did not communicate after the war until the 1970s,
when Nancy was dying of cance r in Paris and they shared the
responsibility of looking after her.

Apart from her family, Diana Mosley had a large circle of admirers,
both Engli sh and French, who were as tantalised by the prospect of a
recollection of Hitler as they were captivated by her charm.

In her memoirs, republished last year, she complained that Par is no
longer had the best dressmakers but that at least it was "beautiful,
bright and clean". She wrote: "Most of my friends are dead but, with
those who remain, and my sons, and above all Debo [the Duchess of
Devonshire] with her generous and loving nature, I am fortunate
beyond words."

She said her 90th birthday was her "last farewell" and quoted Hillaire
Belloc's response when asked what made life worth living: "Laughter
and the love of friends."

But as one American reviewer put it when writing about Diana and
the Mitfords, quoting Nancy: "Alas one's life."


A lifetime staying loyal to her mistakes
By A N Wilson
(Filed: 13/08/2003)

Diana Mosley overcame the all but total deafness of her later years to
remain a gentle, hilarious companion, an adored mother, grandmother
and great-grandmother, and a friend whose conversations and letters I
already miss with aching sadness.

The essence of her humour was an entirely idiosyncratic, mildly
camp understatement, which made some of her utterances to
journalists hard to understand - "Vaguely, Wo!," she once murmured
quietly to a son, who was about to drive her over a cliff.

In a recent interview, she recalled the fraises du bois which she
cultivated in the gardens of Holloway Prison, during her nearly four
years of incarceration there - "They adored the soot".

She was a great gardener, and an interior designer of inspired
brilliance. The little Palladian folly which she inhabited for nearly 50
years - Le Temple de la Gloire, Orsay, Paris - was set, in latter days,
between a hideous sports stadium and a suburban housing estate.
Deafness in these circumstances was almost a blessing.

She continued to live in the house as if it were in beautiful isolation.
The wonderful French things - clocks and barometers and chairs all
redolent of a vanished Napoleonic France - had, many of them, come
from her father's house in the Cotswolds.

There were so many paradoxes about this most beautiful, most
intelligent and most beguiling of the celebrated Mitford sisters.
Although her elder sister Nancy had immorta lised their parents as
upper-class bumpkins in the Oxfordshire countryside, their
background was in fact exotic.

The first Lord Redesdale - the father of "Farve" or Uncle Matthew -
was in a sense the inventor of English fascism, since he translated the
bizarre works of Houston Chamberlain from the German - appalling
tosh about the supremacy of the Teutonic race.

Having fought in the First World War, Diana's father (Farve)
developed a brief hatred of the Hun, which encouraged her, as a
rebellious teenager, to persuade her beloved brother Tom to teach her
German. She read Goethe and Schiller in her father's library at
Swinbrook, the village where her ashes will be buried beside the
graves of her sisters.

Constancy, a virtue in a friend and a wife, led Diana to remain
public ly loyal to some of her more disastrous mistakes - above all,
her enthusiasm for her second husband Sir Oswald Mosley's political
stances, and for Hitler who, in common with Salvador Da li, Lytton
Strachey, Ezra Pound, John Betjeman and Evelyn Waugh, was among
the many figures of the twentieth century bowled over by her charm.

In lat er years, she privately admitted that the Nazis were "really
rather awful". It is a pity that this aspect of her life should have so
coloured Diana's public image, since the truth is that although she
took a keen interest in politics for about 10 years of her nine decades
of existence, she was primarily an aesthete and a conversationalist of
genius.

Lady Mosley
(Filed: 13/08/2003)

Lady Mosley, who died in Paris on Monday aged 93, was a friend of
both Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, and decidedly more
fascinated by the FЯhrer.

The third and the most beautiful of the six Mitford sisters (daughters
of the 3rd Lord Redesdale), she left her first husband Bryan Guinness
to unite her destiny with Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British
Union of Fascists. The uncompromising temperament of the
Mitfords, combined with Mosley's rebarbative politics, involved
renouncing the social life of which she had previously been a leading
ornament.

Three of Diana Mosley's sisters would follow her in forswearing
England for a mixture of a man and ideology. Nancy, her eldest sister,
found in Gaston Palewski the personification of her drooling
Francophilia. Unity became enamoured of Hitler and shot herself at
the outbreak of the war. Jessica became a Communist and married an
American of that persuasion.

In Diana Mosley's memory, Sir Oswald was a figure of unequalled
glamour. "He had every gift, being handsome, generous, intelligent,
and full of wonderful gaiety and joie de vivre. Of course I fell in love
with him . . . and I have never regretted the step I took then."

She left Bryan Guinness in 1932, just as Mosley was forming the
British Union of Fascists. To the horror of her family and friends -
her father forbade her younger sisters to see her again - she set up
house with her two small sons in Eaton Square, and placed herself at
the Leader's disposal.

Yet it was for an uncertain future that she had cast herself aw ay.
Mosley's first wife Cimmie, Lord Curzon's daughter, was still alive;
and Mosley showed no disposition to leave her. "I never dreamed of
marrying him," Diana remembered.

It was as though the fairy princess had been carried off by the demon
king. As Diana Guinness, she had been a leader of a set which
included Augustus John, the Sitwells, Henry Yorke, Evelyn Waugh,
Roy Harrod and Robert Byron. Lytton Strachey paid her court.

Her photograph regularly stared from the covers of t he society
weeklies; her portrait was painted again and again. The face always
seemed to come out the same - large, calm, and staring vacantly into
sp ace. "She was getting like that in real life too," her sister Jessica
acidly observed.

The death of Cimmie Mosley from peritonitis in May 1933 made
p ossible a lifetime commitment to the Leader of the Blackshirts,
which she would honour through every adversity. At first, it seemed
that she might keep him within the bounds of respecta bility. "The
Leader is so clever and in his way so civilised and English," she
explained to Roy Harrod in 1933, "that [his Blackshirts] could not be
c omparable to the German movement. But if everyone of sensibility,
charm and intelligence shuns him, there is definitely a danger that he
will come to regard those virtues as vicious and the possessors of
them as enemies."

But that same year, on the invitation of Hitler's stooge Putzi
Hansfstaengl, Diana Guinness visited Nazi Germany. For her sister
Unity, who accompanied her, the holiday was the beginning of an
obsession that would destroy her life. Diana was also deeply
impressed, and ever afterwards disposed to ignore what she heard of
anti-semitism and concentration camps.

Unity Mitford finally succeeded in making Hitler's acquaintance in
January 1935, and in March proudly introduced him to her sister.
Diana Guinness, in the full flower of her beauty, made a considerable
impression; she herself was dazzled. "His eyes were dark blue,"
Diana rhapsodised about Hitler, "his skin was fair and his brown hair
exceptionally fine. In certain moods he could be very funny. He was
extremely polite towards women. He was the most unselfconscious
politician I have ever come across. He never sought to impress, he
never bothered to act a part. If he felt morose, he was morose. If he
was in high spirits he talked brilliantly."

Later in 1935 Irene Ravensdale, sister of Mosley's first wife, found
the picture of Hitler in Diana Guinness's house at Wootton, in
Staffordshire, "particularly painful". Certainly, Diana's partiality for
the FЯhrer quite outran that of Mosley, who later in life would refer
to Hitler as "a terrible little man".

On October 6 1936, two days after the Blackshirts' humiliating
withdrawal from Cable Street, Diana secretly married Mosley in
Berlin - a wedding arranged under the auspices of Dr Goebbels,
whose wife Magda was a friend of Diana's. Hitler came to dinner
after the wedding, presenting a picture of himself in an eagle-topped
silver frame. Afterwards, the newly-weds had a fierce quarrel: "We
went to bed in dudgeon."

Diana Mosley continued to visit Germany frequently, being involved
in negotiations to set up an independent radio station to broadcast to
Britain from Heligoland; Mosley hoped that this scheme would
finance his movement. She had several private late-night meetings
with Hitler in the Chancellery, and he invited her to Bayreuth.

Mosley, meanwhile, took the line that Britain should stay out of any
conflict with Germany, in order to preserve the Empire by leaving
Hitler a free hand in Europe. As Hitler swept through France in May
1940 Mosley was arrested and imprisoned in Brixton under Defence
Regulation 18b, which empowered the Home Secretary to detain in
prison "any particular person if satisfied that it is necessary to do
so".

In fact, Mosley had frequently declared he would fight for his
country in the event of an invasion. But there were many politicians,
particularly in the Labour Party, who had scores to pay off. By this
time the Mosleys were such pariahs that when Diana gave birth to
their youngest son in April 1940 many Britons were inspired to
write that they were coming to pour vitriol over her babies.

The Mitfords were cousins of Clementine Churchill, the Prime
Minister's wife, and as a girl Diana Mosley used to stay with the
Churchills at Chartwell. This did not prevent her imprison ment in
Holloway at the end of June 1940.

The conditions under which Diana was imprisoned were ghastly, but
she was never one to sue for mercy. Interviewed by a Home Office
Advisory Committee under Lord Birkett in 1940, she put her worst
foot forward. She admitted that she would like to replace the British
political system with the German one "because we think it has done
well for that country". Did she approve of the Nazi policies against
Jews? "Up to point," she declared. "I am not fond of Jews."

When her lawyer asked if she knew anyone in the government who
might help, she gave further hostages to fortune. "Know anyone in
the government?" she cried. "I know all the Tories beginning with
Churchill. The whole lot deserve to be shot." This was reported to
Churchill, who was not amused.

Not until December 1941, after the intervention of Diana's brother
Tom with the Prime Minister, was Mosley allowed to join her in
married quarters at Holloway. After two more years, in November
1943, they were both released on grounds of Mosley's health, and
placed under house arrest until the end of the war.

Evelyn Waugh, who encountered Diana Mosley when she was just
out of prison, told his daughter that he was shocked to observe that
his friend was wearing a swastika diamond brooch. But then the
Mitfords had been brought up to pay scant attention to the opinion
of others.

Diana Freeman-Mitford was born on June 17 1910 into a family
which her sister Nancy would immortalise in Love in a Cold
Climate. Their parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale, featured as Uncle
Matthew and Aunt Sadie. The family first came to prominence in the
18th century, when John Mitford was Speaker of the House of
Commons and (as Lord Redesdale) Lord Chancellor of Ireland. His
son was raised to an earldom in 1877, but nine years later both titles
became extinct.

The Redesdale title would be revived for a cousin, Bertie
(pronounced "Barty") Mitford, whose great-grandfather was William
Mitford, celebrated as the author of The History of Greece. Bertie's
second son, David, Diana's father, married Sydn ey, daughter of
"Tap" Bowles, the founder of Vanity Fair and The Lady. Their
only boy, Tom, was killed in Burma in 1944. Of the more orthodox
daughters, the second, Pamela, married Professor Derek Jackson; and
Debo, the sixth, is the present Duchess of Devonshire.

Diana remembered her father with a great deal more affection than
Nancy or Jessica did. "Not only did he make us scream with laughter
at his lovely jokes," she wrote, "but he was very affectionate.
Certainly he had a qu ick temper, and would often rage, but we were
never punished."

In 1919 Lord Redesdale sold the house his father had built at
Batsford, Gloucestershire, and moved to Astall Manor in
Oxfordshire. The children loved it, and Diana, "in a supreme effort to
make money", kept chickens, pigs and calves. A succession of
governesses - Diana thought 15 - abandoned the attempt to instil
some education. Nevertheless, Diana read avidly, and though regarded
as soft-hearted by her sisters imbibed her share of the family's tough
style. "Do try to hang on this time, darling," Jessica remembered her
saying when riding. "You know how cross Muv will be if you break
your arm again."

The idyll at Astall did not last; after six years Lord Redesdale decided
to build a new house on the hill above Swinbrook. It turned out to be
a monstrosity, but for the children there was the compensation that
he also bought a large house in London, at 26 Rutland Gate. In 1926
Diana was sent to stay in Paris, where she attended a day school and
in six months learnt more than she had during six years in England.

Evelyn Waugh thought that her beauty "ran through the room like a
peal of bells". Jim Lees-Milne, who was a friend of Tom Mitford's at
Eton, remembered her as "the most divine adolescent I ever beheld: a
goddess, more immaculate, more perfect, more celestial than
Botticelli's sea-borne Venus". In 1928 this vision came to the
attention of Bryan Guinness, and within weeks they were engaged.

Lady Redesdale objected strenuously to her prospective son-in-law
on the grounds that he was "so frightfully rich". Nancy Mitford
thought he was perfectly all right, but could not imagine why her
sister should want to marry him. Eventually, though, consent was
granted, and the wedding took place on January 30 1929.

Apart from her two sons, the most notable achievement of Diana
Guinness's first marriage was a spoof exhibition of the works of a
mythical artist called Bruno Hat. Brian Howard produced most of the
paintings; Evelyn Waugh wrote the catalogue and Tom Mitford
impersonated Hat.

At Biddesdon, their country house near Andover, Diana was able for
the first time to employ her talent for interior decoration. At the end
of her life she expressed gratitude for having lived in three beautiful
houses: Biddesdon, Wootton and, from 1950, the pretentiously
entitled (though not by the Mosleys) Temple de la Gloire on the
outskirts of Paris; the house was known to thei r foes as "The
Concentration of Camp".

After the Second World War, the Mosleys lived on a farm at
Crowood, near Ramsbury in Wiltshire. Though largely ignored by the
local residents, they appeared content in their self-sufficiency;
whatever else might be said about them, no one could deny the
success of their marriage.

In 1951 Mosley, now obsessed with the ideal of creating a united
Europe, decided to leave England and divide his time between the
Temple de la Gloire and a house he had bought in Galway. "You
don't clear up a dungheap from underneath it," he commented of his
decision to leave England.

In France, Diana Mosley edited The European, a magazine that
boasted contributions from Ezra Pound, Henry Williamson and Roy
Campbell. She herself contributed reviews and comme nt, showing a
sharpness that would not have shamed her sister Nancy.

Her loyalty to Mosley remained absolute, though she did venture to
suggest, when he stood for North Kensington in 1959, that the use
by his supporters of such terms as "fuzzy wuzzies" was not likely
to bolster his credentials as a serious politician. In Paris, the Mosleys
discovered that they had much in common with the Duke and
Duchess of Windsor, and in 1980 Diana published a book on the
Duchess.

If Diana Mosley never enjoyed the literary success of her sister
Nancy, she was undoubtedly happier. Thrusting aside all
remembrance of Nancy's betrayal of her during the war, Diana proved
the main consolation in her sister's painful and protracted final
illness, which ended in 1973. But she never made her peace with
Jessica, who had declared at the end of the war that the Mosleys
should be thrown back into prison. "She's a rather boring person
really," Diana concluded.

Sir Oswald Mosley died in 1980, and a year later Diana Mosley
suffered from a brain tumour. It turned out to be benign and was
operated upon successfully. While convalesci ng she was visited by
Lord Longford. "Of course, he thinks I'm Myra Hindley," Diana
remarked.

Although her book of memoirs, A Life of Contrasts (1977), was
deliberately provocative, most of those who met her found her a
delightful companion, while to her sisters' children she was Aunt
Honks. On one subject, however, she remained incorrigible.

"They will go on persecuting me until I say Hitler was ghastly," she
acknowledged. "Well, what's the point in saying that? We all know he
was a monster, that he was very cruel and did terrible things. But that
doesn't alter the fact that he was obviously an interesting figure. It
was fascinating for me, at 24, to sit and talk with him, to ask him
questions and get answers, even if they weren't true ones. No torture
on earth would get me to say anything different."

"I was very fond of him," she admitted in an interview in 2000.
"Very, very fond."

Of her sons from her first marriage, the elder, Jonathan, is the 3rd
Lord Moyne, while the younger, Desmond, founded the Irish
Georgian Society. There were two sons from her second marriage; the
younger, Max, is President of the Federation Internationale de
l'Automobile.